


blood and honey

by boo98 (butter)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Crime Procedural, Featuring Twice, M/M, Modern magic AU, Mystery, Phoenix Woojin, Some blood talk, Vampire Chan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butter/pseuds/boo98
Summary: Bang Chan, age 29, vampire. Head of the department of the Seoul police station specializing in cases involving non-humans. Likes music, playing video games with his roommates, and days where the cloud cover is just strong enough that he doesn’t have to wear long sleeves and SPF 50 sunscreen.When a woman disappears from her apartment with no trace his team is called in to assist in getting to the bottom of it all. He doesn’t expect to get partnered up with the half-phoenix head of the magical forensic department, and he really doesn’t expect to be quite that bowled over by his smile, or his eyebrows, or – any of it. He can improvise, though.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first expedition into Stray Kids, I hope I do these good good boys justice. This exists in the same universe as my [Sewoon/Daniel fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10753389), but you don't need to read that to understand any of this. Shout out to [Greg the Vampire](https://aggybird.livejournal.com/22022.html#cutid1), an absolutely classic and fantastic piece of original monster fiction, for inspiring the vampire/phoenix idea for this whole thing.
> 
> There will be some blood and some violence and some vampire nonsense but I'll tag (and possibly up the rating) as needed!
> 
> Find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ponyoprince) for more nonsense!

“There’s plain, sesame, and everything,” Jisung says, tossing the paper bag of bagels onto the rickety plastic card table that serves as the break room in the office, pushed into the corner next to a sink that was always full of coffee mugs and a dinky little mini-fridge that most people didn’t actually touch. “There was supposed to be a marble rye one too but Changbin got to it first.”

“That’s the delivery tax,” comes a voice from around the corner, where Changbin had immediately ran off to check the inter-department mail after busting through the front door like a breakfast-wielding thunderstorm. “Complain when you actually go do something nice.”

Chan, still sitting at his desk in the back of the room, feet propped up on the one empty corner that isn’t covered in paperwork, snorts. “You know, no one asks you to do these things.”

“Right, and doesn’t that make it even more angelic and giving of me?”

“Don’t egg him on.” Jisung shakes a plain bagel from the bag, picks up the Red Bull he’s been nursing for the past thirty minutes of not working, and sits down heavily at the folding chair next to the table. “Want anything, chief?”

“Don’t call me that.” Chan takes a moment to stretch, arms above his head, mostly just to hear the way the vertebrae in his spine crack before relaxing. “Gimme an everything one.”

“Come get it yourself.” Despite his words Jisung only takes two minutes of doctoring his own bagel before slapping an everything one onto a paper plate and bringing it back to Chan.

“You’ve always been my favorite,” Chan wheedles, taking the plate and grinning up at Jisung. “Don’t tell Hyunjin.”

“Don’t tell Felix, more like.” Jisung huffs good-naturedly and perches himself on the corner of Chan’s desk, nudging his feet out of the way. “He still thinks the sun shines out of your ass, you know.”

“That would be incredibly unfortunate if true,” Chan allows, and starts meticulously picking at his bagel. “Has he told you about his new class?”

“They sound like all the other ones – full of terrors. He’s already had to change up the seating chart twice, and it’s still September.” Jisung chews on his bagel and watches Chan for a few moments. “I don’t know why you insist on getting the everything ones if you’re just going to do this every time.”

“These are my favorite.” He pouts and keeps brushing the sticky bits of garlic off of the top of the bagel, making a sad-looking pile at the side of the paper plate. “The just sesame ones aren’t anywhere as good.”

“I just don’t get why you don’t take those allergy meds for this.”

“They give me headaches.” Chan finally picks off the last bits of garlic and rips off a piece of one half of the bagel, popping it in his mouth and continuing on as he chews. “It’s alright as long as I’m not eating too much of it, anyways.”

“So you say.” Jisung rolls his eyes. “Don’t come whining to me when you end up with a stomach ache in an hour.”

“Who’s the chief here, huh?”

“Thought you didn’t want me calling you that?”

“When did you start listening to what I tell you?”

“I see you’re all being really productive.” Changbin busts back into the room, armful of thin manila envelopes tucked against his chest. “Some things for you to sign, Chan.”

“Gimme.” Chan wiggles his hands at the mail, accepting most of the envelopes from Changbin. “Any updates on that stalking case?”

“Not really. They’re passing it off to the hex crew to see if they can figure out anything new.” Jisung’s cheeks bulge out with food as he eyes the mail. “’S definitely a fucking creep, if he went into hex territory.”

“He’s a fucking creep no matter what.” Chan pushes his plate off to the side to make room for the mail, undoing the metal clasp on the first envelope and pulling out the thin packet of paper. “There’s no non-creepy way to put a tracker that detailed on someone’s front door.”

“Hex crew might be able to tell if it was doing anything other than tracking, though.” Changbin pulls out the rolling chair from his desk next to Chan’s and collapses into it, bony knees jabbing Jisung in the calves. “Remember how she was feeling sick for a while there? They think it might have had some energy-drain properties too.”

“Fuckin’ creep,” Jisung repeats, shoving the rest of his bagel in his mouth and chewing violently.

Chan hums, agreeing, and flips through the packet before scribbling his signature at the bottom of the report and tossing it into the ‘done’ pile at the edge of the desk.

“Open that one now,” Changbin says, poking at the largest envelope in the pile. “It’s from missing persons.”

“You could sound a little less excited about that,” Chan retorts, kicking at Changbin’s chair to get him to scoot back a bit. He opens that one next anyways, noting immediately how heavy the packet is. Something must have really happened.

“Oh shit,” Jisung says, muffled through bagel. “That looks intense.”

It is. Chan skims the summary overview at the top of the report, shoulders inching up near his ears as he reads.

The summary is pretty simple – missing person, signs of struggle, concerned and influential family. Last seen just under a week ago at her workplace. But –

“This doesn’t say anything about suspected non-human factors,” Chan says before really thinking about it. “Why’d they send this to us?”

“Looks like there was some pretty intense magical residuals.” Jisung points at an energy map in the corner of the page, which has a sketchy layout of the room and corresponding magical frequencies.

“Centered on where all the struggle happened, too,” Chan mutters, scratching at the back of his neck as he skims the page and then flips to the next one. “Still, we’re not really the experts on just plain magic. The missing person is human, so – “

“Maybe they think a non-human got her.” Changbin huffs and leans forward, elbows on the armrests of the chair. “Anything about suspects?”

“Some stuff.” The second page is a detailed personal history of the missing woman – Myoui Mina, 29, marketing manager, single, living alone. Human non-practitioner. “She doesn’t use magic.”

“So they think a witch zapped her or something?”

“Dunno.” Chan flips around a bit more, heart sinking in his chest. “Family seem like some real big shots – they own the company she works for.”

Changbin whistles. “Big money. Think that’s why downtown’s pulling out all the stops?”

“Maybe.”

“What, do they think this was corporate espionage or something?” Jisung tugs the packet away from Chan and looks it over, brow furrowed. “That’s a long list of potential suspects.”

“That’s just what the parents came up with. It still needs to be vetted by the people handling the case, and I'm sure they'll come up with some other ones too.” Chan sighs and pushes his bagel a little further away – he doesn’t have the appetite for that anymore. Not that he ever really does, but still. "When do they want us to come by?"

Jisung snorts, lowering the packet just enough to peer over the edge of the paper at Chan. "This afternoon. Hope you didn't have any other plans."

"Great." Chan lets Changbin swipe the remains of his bagel and leans back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. "It's supposed to be a beautiful day, too."

"Hope you packed your sunscreen, chief," Jisung says, slapping Chan on the back and standing up, finally wandering over to his own desk. "It's a fifteen minute walk to this address from the nearest bus stop."

Chan groans and buries his face in his arms. "Sounds amazing."

 

Chan's parents always say that he was an energetic kid. He played soccer and led a small gang of neighborhood kids throughout the neighborhood every weekend and summer break. If they could get him home for dinner by sunset it was a small miracle.

Things changed when he was nine.

Chan doesn't think about it too much. He didn't like to dwell on things you couldn't do anything about. It was too depressing, and Chan tried to make a habit out of being as non-depressing as a vampire possibly could.

Because, yeah. That had happened.

After the fact his mom would always talk about what a miracle it was, that Chan had even survived. He had been found in a side street just a block away from his house, shirt collar soaked red and skin pale from blood loss. The doctors at the hospital that he'd been rushed to had said it was amazing that he hadn't bled out, much less that the change had actually taken successfully.

Change bites only happened rarely, and usually the effects of the change were enough to tip the scales and end up with the person just plain dead. And not in the fun, undead way, just. Dead.

There had been a few months of police investigation, pockmarked with long stints in the hospital as they tried to stabilize the change. Vampire activity was highly regulated, with licensed vamps kept under close watch, and the police seemed embarrassed to admit that the attack had even happened.

Chan hadn't really cared about the investigation at the time. He was too busy moping around and getting used to not really feeling hungry, not in the way that he was used to feeling hungry.

This hunger was less in his stomach and more in his bones, spiking suddenly in his chest and throat without warning. It freaked him out, especially back then, and the government-mandated deliveries of blood pouches had only barely taken the edge off.

Freshly-changed vamps were the most unstable, the doctors had told his parents in hushed whispers just outside the door to his hospital room. It would really be safer to keep him in the hospital for a little longer, until they were more confident that he wouldn't snap and try biting anyone, anything.

"I just think he'd do better recovering at home," his mom had said, sounding worried even through the door. Chan rolled over in his hospital bed and wondered whether the doctors knew that his hearing was better, now. "He's a good kid, really. I don't think staying here would be any better for him."

Face buried in the thin material of the hospital pillows, breathing in the smell of sharp disinfectant and the metallic iron pills that he had to take now as he recovered, Chan didn't know which party he wanted to win out.

Still, he'd passed through the worst of it at home. The house seemed different with the curtains drawn closed, even though the specialists they had seen had said that the sun really wasn't that bad for him as long as he wasn't in direct light for longer than a few minutes.

Chan had eventually worn his parents down enough to get them to let some light in, and promptly given himself second-degree burns from falling asleep in the thin beam of light. The curtains had gone closed again after that.

They never had been able to track down the vampire who had attacked him. The police stammered out different ideas to his mom every time she called them for an update - maybe it had been starved, maybe it was blood-mad, maybe it was a completely random attack.

These days, Chan knows more about the development of tracking spells for these kind of things. They had been invented just three years after his attack, and made practically airtight within another couple of years.

It was a little like before they knew how to use DNA testing to solve crimes, Chan thinks these days when he finds himself in a slump. He doesn't find himself in them often, but it happens. Usually it's when the pack is out of town, or when he has a particularly long day at work, or a case that strikes a little too close to home. Or when the pouches that get delivered every week taste just a bit more awful, or when his bones ache to be in the sun, or when his mom gets a little weepy over the phone.

So. Sometimes it happens.

Still, the whole thing was the main reason he was in the line of work that he was in. Human police tended to want to pass off any non-human related crimes - they didn't know enough about the differences between species, and those details could make or break investigations.

Chan, with his dual degrees in criminal justice and non-human studies, had made pretty solid niche for himself after only a few years on the force. Sure, some of the other departments still liked to walk a wide berth around their corner of the building, but Chan didn't fault them for it too much.

Staffing it with half of a juvenile wolfborn pack plus their vamp pack head wasn't the most standard operating procedure.

"You're way better than a wolf alpha, anyways," Jisung would say, head on Hyunjin's knees and legs tossed over Chan's lap as they watched some cheesy drama together. "They always get big egos about being heads of packs."

Then he would grin and tip his head to the side to look up at Chan, eyes bright and teasing. "You have a big ego, yeah, but for other reasons I guess."

That would always end with Jisung dumped off of the couch and usually on the receiving end of a headlock, but that was how they did things.

The pack had never been weird about Chan's particular medical issue - he'd met Changbin first, in class, and things had moved pretty quickly after that, especially when they figured out that he and Felix had both spent parts of their childhood in Australia.

"'S a good thing you don't live there anymore, huh?" Changbin asked one afternoon, the five of them taking over the corner of a barbecue place and getting a lot of concerned looks from the employees as they kept ordering more servings. "That must be a lot of sun."

Felix shot Chan a concerned look but Chan just shrugged. "Yeah, probably. Seoul has a little stronger non-human support infrastructure, too," he added, poking at the meat on the grill with the tongs. All of them preferred theirs on the rare side, just for different reasons.

"Doesn't mean they're not assholes about it still," Jisung grumbled, shoving his sneakers under the table until they kicked up against Chan's ankles. "I can't believe you actually have to get tracked. It's like you're a dog."

Chan snorted and rubbed self-consciously at the spot at his wrist where the tiny chip was implanted, keenly aware of it even for how he couldn't actually feel it. "Just in case I snap, or something. Wouldn't you rather the police be able to find rabid vamps if they have to?"

"Sure, but it just seems dehumanizing."

"That's kind of the point, huh?" Chan laughed and accepted Jisung's annoyed kick. "We're not really human, anyways."

Hyunjin sighed and leaned harder against Changbin's side, face pressed into his shoulder limply. "Can we change the subject? I'm losing my appetite."

Changbin snorted and elbowed Hyunjin in the side but also passed some seared bits of pork from the grill to his plate. "If you ever lose your appetite it means the world's gonna end, you black hole."

Chan had laughed more, shaken his head, and let Felix loop their arms together at the elbow while they polished off the remainder of the pork.

Five years later and they still lived together in one messy apartment, Felix with his teaching job and Hyunjin in grad school while the rest tore it up on the force. It wasn't anything Chan could have predicted when he was a kid, but it was pretty awesome. Weekly deliveries of lukewarm, plastic-tasting blood notwithstanding.

 

The trip to the crime scene goes pretty quickly, all things considered. Sometimes they get to borrow a squad car for longer trips - Chan always prefers those, because the windows are tinted and he can get through the city traffic easily in them even with the sirens off.

Today, though, they end up on the subway, then the bus, then on foot through the cleanly-kept corner of the city that the woman - Mina - lived in.

"Lives in," Jisung corrects when Chan mentions it, the three of them keeping close to the storefronts to take advantage of the overhangs that cast shadow onto the sidewalk. "We don't know if she's dead yet."

" _Yet,_ " Changbin grumbles, hands shoved in the pockets of his uniform slacks. "Missing for almost a week, plus signs of struggle? That doesn't sound super optimistic."

"Especially if they're this eager to bring outside departments into it," Chan admits, checking their location on his phone GPS. "Usually this means that they're out of ideas."

"Guess we'll find out soon," Jisung says, and nods towards the approaching apartment building. "I think this is it."

The apartment is tall and sleek, with one of the fancy lobbies where you have to buzz in with a front desk attendant just to use the elevator. Chan flashes her his badge and she quickly directs them to floor thirteen, just a few down from the very top of the building.

"Bless your hearts," she says as they wait for the elevator to arrive, brushing her hair back from her face. "Hopefully you find something more, hm? Miss Myoui is too good of a person for this to happen to."

Chan shifts uncomfortably, shoes squeaking against the polished tile floor. "We'll do our best, ma'am," he finally says, earning a quick side pinch from Changbin who snorts just quietly enough to not be heard by human ears. "Thanks for your help."

When they get to the apartment it's clear that basically all reinforcements have been called in. The apartment itself is fairly modestly-sized, a one-bedroom one-bath with a cozy living space and a nice-sized kitchen. There's a balcony that overlooks the street outside, with fluttery-thin white curtains hung on either side of the window leading out to it.

The rest of the apartment is pretty hard to tell anything about, considering it's filled with people.

"Oh shit," Jisung mutters under his breath, and Chan silently agrees. A gaggle of uniformed officers are stationed in a loose circle around the living room area of the apartment, hands behind their backs and clearly waiting for someone to even look at something wrong.

There are people everywhere - a couple inspecting the panel at the wall that looks like it controls the security system, some peering around the kitchen like it'll have the key to the whole thing, some hanging back and jotting notes in small notebooks.

The living room seems like the kind of place that would look cozy and lived-in, but still cutely decorated. The couch is tipped over onto its side, though, and the coffee table is cracked in half. The hardwood floor is covered in a scattering of loose chunks of filling from one of the couch cushions, and there's a faint smell of smoke around everything.

The team in charge must have marked points of interest with small flags, because there's one by the pile of couch filling and one by the cracked table.

There's also one sitting next to a dark, sticky-looking stain on the floor near the side table next to the couch.

Changbin seems to be following Chan's line of sight, because he breathes in heavily and then eyes Chan. "They did say there was sign of struggle."

"Right." Chan swallows thickly, the lingering scent of dried blood sour in the air. "Let's see if they'll let some punks like us a bit closer."

They don't have to worry too much about getting let into the scene, it turns out, because they make it about five feet past the threshold of the apartment before the regional head detective appears out of nowhere and grabs Chan by the forearms.

"You made it!" Im Nayeon is only a few years older than Chan but is always such a whirlwind of motion that he's always been a little intimidated by her, regardless of how sweet she is and how brightly-colored her shoes are. "We were starting to get worried you wouldn't show."

"We?" Chan asks, nervously wiggling his arms free while trying not to seem too scared. He heard somewhere that some animals could smell fear, and Nayeon always seemed like the type to be able to as well. "Didn't realize we were the stars of the show here."

"Oh, you know how it is." She withdraws a step and crosses her arms over her neat blouse, the wrinkles at the elbows of her blazer the only sign that she probably spent the better portion of the past couple of nights here. "The guys from the main office don't like to extrapolate too much about non-human possibilities, they get nervous about getting it wrong."

"We're definitely not worried about getting it wrong," Jisung says, shooting Nayeon a thumbs up. "We do that all the time."

She gives him a flat, assessing look, before turning back to Chan. "I can get them to clear out of here for a little bit, if you want."

"That'd be great, actually." He rubs the back of his neck, looking past her at the mess that is the living room. "Some space to work would be nice."

"No problem." Nayeon gives him one more pat on the arm, which he definitely doesn't flinch away from, and then turns to the nearest uniformed guard to give him a swift series of instructions.

They hang back to wait, and Chan sees Jisung give Changbin a curious look. "You smell that, right?"

"What?" Changbin still has his hands in his pockets but his posture is straighter now, curious, a little on edge. "The smoke, or the blood?"

"No, like - I mean, yeah, both of those, but..." Jisung trails off with a huff and glances around. "Something else, too. I dunno. I'll figure it out."

Nayeon returns after a few minutes and claps her hands at them. "It's all yours for a little bit. They'll have to keep some of their guys around, just to make sure nothing gets contaminated, but I'll get the rest of everyone cleared out for a moment."

She rubs her palms together, looking determined. "I'm the one who made sure you guys got the call to come out here, so don't make me look bad, alright?"

"Oh, no pressure, though," Jisung mutters, and shoots her a sunny grin when she gives him a look. "We got it, don't worry, we'll crack this whole thing wide open."

Nayeon frowns, and Chan notices now the dark circles under her eyes. It must have really been a long past couple of days. "Seriously," she says, leveling the words at Jisung now. "The city's calling their own guys in too, I don't want them to show you guys up."

"We'll make you proud," Changbin butts in, slinging an arm over Jisung's shoulders and mirroring his thumbs up from before. "We're the dream team, the three of us."

She gives all of them a long, assessing look, before letting out a breath, shoulders drooping. "You have fifteen minutes before I'll have to let the rest of them back in," she finally says, and moves to head out the door with the rest of the crowd. "Make the most of it, okay?" She herds a group of investigators with their notebooks out the door as she goes, and in just a matter of time the three of them are the only ones in the apartment aside from a scattering of uniformed guards.

"Alright," Jisung says, already making a beeline for the couch. "What the hell happened here?"

"This isn't just signs of struggle," Chan says, following close behind while Changbin hangs back and pulls his phone out to take pictures. "This looks more like a small explosion. Or an animal attack."

Jisung hums and crouches down in front of the marked pool of dried blood. "I'm not picking up any mammal scents or anything like that. Just human ones - the same one, mostly. Probably that's Mina," he says, glancing up for Changbin to confirm it with a nod. "The blood is weird, though, right?"

"It doesn't look like it's from her getting stabbed or anything," Chan says, kneeling down next to Jisung. The nearest guard gets a little twitchy as they get closer to the blood but doesn't say anything, and lets Chan lean in close enough to see the way the pool is shaped.

It's dark and hard to see against the wood flooring, but it's spread in a fairly even pool just to the side of the table next to the knocked-over couch. "I don't really see any splattering or anything."

"Does it make you want a snack?" Jisung asks, sputtering when Chan shoves him to the side. "No, seriously, does it smell weird? Like, drugged, or anything?"

Chan rolls his eyes but sniffs the air anyways. His sense of smell hadn't gotten anywhere near as sharp as some of his other senses after the change, but it was different with blood, for obvious reasons. "Not really. Nothing chemical, at least. There could be magical traces of something, but I can't tell that immediately."

"This is weird, right?" They look over to Changbin, who's poking around the two halves of the cracked coffee table. "Would it break like this if someone just fell on it?"

"If they were pushed really hard, maybe." Jisung straightens up, leaving Chan by the blood as he goes to join Changbin. "Are we looking at something with super strength, then?"

"That's not necessarily non-human," Chan says, still eying the pool of dried blood. "There are tons of charms that can enhance strength."

"What about the smoke, then?" Changbin waves a hand in the air as if brushing the smoke away, even though the smell of it is long-stale. "That's a classic spell aftereffect, right?"

"Right." Jisung props his hands on his hips and surveys the bottom of the tipped-over couch, brow pinched. "Chan's right about the small explosion, kind of. This seems more like released energy, rather than a fight or something."

"That's textbook spell, then." Chan sits down on the floor near the bloodstain, hands hanging off of his knees. "We need a magic specialist in here. I don't know anything about spellwork."

"I'm surprised they haven't already called one in," Jisung says over the sound of beeps as Changbin messes with the security system panel on the wall near the door. "Do they think this was just a standard kidnapping?"

"Her parents are rich, right?" Changbin grunts as the system makes an angry trilling noise. "They might be looking for ransom money."

"Or blackmail!" Jisung claps, the noise echoing loudly in the mostly-empty apartment. "Maybe they want something else out of them."

Chan half-listens as Jisung and Changbin go off on a tangent about white-collar espionage, still eying the pool of blood.

He draws in another breath, thoughtfully. It does just kind of smell like any old blood - dried up and a little sour to his stomach, and undeniably human.

"This is definitely the same blood as the scent in the apartment, right?" Chan asks Jisung, who nods.

"The scents match," he says. "Assuming that's Mina's scent then it's definitely her blood. You think it could be someone else's?"

"Not really," Chan says, frowning at the stain. "It's just strange. Whether this was a nonmagical or magical kidnapping, there's no other blood anywhere."

"Do you think they cleaned things up but just missed that part?"

"That doesn't really make any sense, though, right? They clean up most of the blood but just miss this whole patch?" Chan resists the urge to poke the stain, and just stares at it harder as if it'll suddenly make more sense. "It's just gonna bother me, that's all."

Changbin makes an excited noise from the door and the security panel chimes happily. "This system records any time the door is opened and whether the alarm was deactivated or not," he says, pushing some more buttons on the panel. "Looks like the last time anyone came in here before the police forced entry was Wednesday evening."

"That was the last day she was seen at work, right? It's Monday now," Jisung says, skipping over to peer over Changbin's shoulder. "Was it Mina coming home?"

"Probably." Changbin pokes at the screen. "Whoever it was, they knew the code to deactivate the system when they were entering."

"So Mina, or someone close enough to her to know her security code."

"Or someone who knew the right charm to figure out which buttons were pressed most often, and in what order."

Jisung shoots Chan a disappointed look from across the room. "You're making this harder."

"Yeah, I think it's my job." Chan settles back on his hands, watching the two of them poke at the security panel. "Are your wolfie senses picking up any other weird smells?"

"Stop trying to make this a Spiderman thing, it's not gonna happen." Jisung peels away from Changbin anyways, and toes through the shoes at the entryway before meandering into the kitchen area. "Not really. If I knew to look for something specific I might be able to pick it up, but everything else smells pretty standard for a person living on their own." He opens the fridge. "She ate healthy, I can tell you that."

Chan huffs out a laugh and eyes the room vaguely. "A single woman living by herself with a successful career and a good diet. It really does happen to everybody, huh?"

"What, mysterious kidnappings?" More sounds of opening and shutting cabinets echo from the kitchen as Jisung apparently just makes himself at home. "That's the world we live in, man. Nothing's fair."

Chan makes a grunt of agreement and shifts his position on the floor until he's sitting cross-legged, still a good foot and a half away from the bloodstain. He eyes the knocked-over couch as Jisung rattles around in the kitchen and Changbin pokes at the security system some more.

The ripped cushion looks almost like it burst - the seam split all along one side, stuffing falling out in rough chunks. He leans forward a bit to get a better look at it.

"No," he finds himself muttering, moving up into a crouch now so he can inch around the bloodstain and get close enough to touch the couch cushion. "That would be so cliché."

Still, he pauses only a second to reconsider before reaching forward to tug at the split edge of the couch cushion. He has just enough time to wiggle his hand in through the seam, poking at the ripped-up stuffing, fingertips brushing the hard edge of something cold and smooth when the apartment door swings open.

Changbin squawks in surprise and Jisung lets one of the kitchen cabinets shut too-loudly as a handful of new figures push in through the doorframe.

Chan, for his part, falls straight backwards on his ass, fingertips still tingling.

"Hey," Changbin says, the first to speak - of course. "We get the scene for another five minutes. Talk to Detective Im if you have to, she'll vouch for us."

"I think we take precedent, sorry," one of the new guys says, shooting Changbin a look that's first placating and then heavily concerned. "Are you supposed to be touching that?"

The three guys who push past Changbin and into the main room of the apartment look kind of out of place - Chan wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the first crime scenes they had been to. One of them has a laptop carrying case slung over his shoulder, and another looks like he could barely be out of undergrad, blinking at the whole thing with obvious excitement.

Chan lets out a sigh and hauls himself to his feet. "Look," he says, stepping carefully around the loose stuffing scattered on the floor in between the couch and the broken table. "We don't need to go all turf war with it. Just give us a couple more minutes to wrap things up and it's all yours."

The one with the laptop bag gives him a sunny grin, and Chan can practically see Jisung's hackles raise from where he's hanging back near the entrance to the kitchen. "It's kind of a time-sensitive matter, though," he says, blinking wide-eyed at him. "Magical energy signatures can fade really quickly, and it's already been almost a week."

Chan glances over their shoulders at Changbin, who's leaning against the wall and looking like he would like to bite something. "You're magic specialists, then?"

The grinning one laughs brightly and elbows the one who's still looking at Changbin like he thinks he's one second away from breaking the security panel. "See, Seungmin, I told you we'd look official."

"Right," Seungmin says, glancing away from Changbin finally to give Chan a once over. "I guess we are, but mostly we're just here to assist Dr. Kim."

"Dr. Kim?" Chan looks from Seungmin to the third one, who quickly waves his hands in front of him.

"Oh no, not me, I'm - we're all finishing up school, this is just our shadowing assignment."

"You didn't have to tell him that, Jeongin." The one with the laptop's smile slips, just a bit.

"So you three don't really know what you're doing at all, then?" Jisung says from the side, leaning against the doorway. "You should probably let people who've already graduated handle things, huh?" Chan's sure if he was feeling just a little more threatened he would be flashing teeth at the three of them.

"Oh, we are!" The laptop guy directs his grin at Jisung now, who twitches back at the force of it. "Dr. Kim's the leading expert on magical forensics in the whole city."

Chan shifts on his feet, uncomfortable about the whole situation. "You're all from forensics? Aren't you usually here first thing?"

"Dr. Kim just got back in the country," Seungmin says, folding his arms in front of himself. "He had to come here straight from the airport."

Finally, as if drawn there by magic - Chan has heard about charms that involve calling someone's name three times, but he's pretty sure it had been four by now - a fourth figure slips through the front door of the apartment, shutting it gently behind him.

"Oh," he says, peeking around Seungmin's side and blinking at the sight of the apartment - furniture ruined, blood spilled, and Chan standing like an idiot in the middle of it all. "This sure is something, huh?"

Dr. Kim turns out to be a man about Chan's age, about his height, with warmly tanned skin, broad shoulders, and a strong jawline. He's wearing a wrinkled button-up - clearly, having just gotten off a plane, apparently - but he still manages to look brightly wide-awake. He has neat brown hair and concerned, kind eyebrows, and just him stepping in the room seems to up the ambient temperature by a good five degrees.

Chan's stomach does something funny, and he rubs at the back of his neck, breathing in deep before thinking about it. The apartment had smelled vaguely of scented candles and laundry lint, underneath the more obvious tinges of smoke and blood, but now it's like someone just threw back the curtains and opened the windows onto a bright, summer day.

Oh, no. He takes in another breath, this one more deliberate, and carefully notes the sunny warmth of it, the way it almost burns another dimension onto the stale smell of smoke that was already in the room.

He eyes the way that the three grad students part quickly to let Dr. Kim more fully into the room, glancing down at his hands before he can stop himself. His knuckles look bare, but Chan knows better by now than to make any judgements based just off of that.

"Magic forensics is taking over, then?" He hears Jisung snap from the kitchen, clearly already territorial about it all. "We must have been doing pretty bad, to get kicked off the case after like ten minutes."

"Oh, no, you're not kicked off." Dr. Kim pauses, seems to think about it for a moment, and shrugs. "Or, I don't think you are? Nayeon thought I could help, is the thing."

"You know Nayeon?" Chan asks before his brain can filter the words, and his stomach jumps when Dr. Kim turns and looks at him.

"We work together a lot," he says, peering across the room at Chan curiously. "You're Bang Chan, right?"

"Uh." Chan's brain kind of - stops. It takes a second to catch back up, and by that point he's already stammered out, "Yeah, uh, I am, how'd - how'd you, um, know?"

Changbin shoots him an absolutely delighted look from over the shoulders of the troupe of grad students as Dr. Kim grins. It completely changes his face, makes his eyes squint and his nose scrunch and - Chan's gonna stop there, actually. "You're a bit of a celebrity, around the magic-centered departments. We needed non-human focused experts for a while, so it's been good to have you around."

Dr. Kim steps forward, close enough now that Chan can tell he actually has an inch or two on him, although it doesn't make him look any more intimidating. The temperature goes up, again, or maybe Chan's face is just getting red, but that doesn't really happen these days - it takes the kind of blood flow that he doesn't really have, anymore.

The other man holds out a hand, which Chan takes after a second of blinking wide-mouthed at it. His palm is almost too hot, stinging like the feeling when you stick your half-frozen feet under the hot water after a day in the snow. It fades into something more comfortable after a moment, though, and Chan almost doesn't want to let go after he shakes his hand.

It takes a lot for Chan to really feel warm, these days.

"Doctor Kim Woojin," Dr. Kim says, pulling his hand back and hooking his thumbs in his trouser pockets as he smiles crookedly at Chan. "Head of the magical forensics department. You've already met my interns, I guess, but I promise they're more helpful after you get used to them."

That punches a laugh out of Chan before he expects it, and his hands hang at his side awkwardly before he puts them in his pockets, too, more for something to do with them than for any other reason. "I'd say the same about my guys, but I don't know if I'd ever really call them helpful."

The guy with the laptop gives Jisung another grin, and Jisung actually does bare his teeth at him this time.

Woojin shakes his head, amused, but his attention stays steadily on Chan, who feels a little bit like he's melting under the warmth of it. "I'm sure they're fine. And seriously, don't undersell yourself. I don't know if you know it," he says, tipping his head just a degree to the side, "but you're a bit of a celebrity with the non-humans on the force."

Chan blinks, surprised, and Changbin actually snorts into his hand to hide his laugh. "A what?"

"You know." Woojin shrugs, smile still not slipping. "It can be hard to be in a primarily-human line of work. Especially regulated species, although I can't really speak to that, but it's always good for the younger generations to have role models."

That clicks, and then Chan remembers the sudden smell of sun and fire when Woojin had come into the apartment. "Oh. Uh. I know it's rude, but can I ask - "

Woojin laughs, tips his head back and bares his throat and Chan definitely has to look away at that because Jesus Christ, some people should come with warning labels. "It's fine, I'm not super mainstream anyways." He tips his head back down to shrug abashedly at Chan, grin tilted and eyes bright. "I'm half phoenix. It makes it really easy to tell who's from what side of the family at reunions."

"Oh, wow, dude." Jisung pipes up from the kitchen, finally turning away from harassing the interns. "Phoenix, that's super old school."

"Jisung," Chan bites out.

"No, seriously, it is!" He steps out of the kitchen entrance, peering curiously at Woojin who bears the attention calmly. "Do you catch on fire and stuff? Can you regenerate yourself?"

Woojin chuckles. "I haven't really wanted to test that out, exactly. Seems a bit risky. There's only a few halves out there like me," he clarifies, shooting Chan a look. "Not much research out there. I just kind of do my thing and hope that I don't need to invest in fireproof clothes any time soon."

Chan has to bite down the inner scientist in him that desperately wants to immediately start testing everything possible that could happen to half-phoenixes, and instead just twitches a shoulder at the couch. "Do you know anything about charmed items?"

Jisung, Changbin, and the interns look mostly stunned at the sudden change in subject, but Woojin rolls with it smoothly. "Sure, I guess it depends what the type of charm is. Anything specific?"

"I'm not sure," Chan says, turning back to the couch and glancing at the nearest guard, who seems to have taken this entire drama unfolding completely unfazed. "I think someone stuffed something into this cushion, and I really don't want to accidentally release a curse or something if I try to grab it."

"In the couch?" Woojin crouches down next to Chan and peers at the busted seam of the cushion. "Here, can you hold it for me?"

"Uh, sure." Chan gingerly holds the busted seam open enough that Woojin can look inside. "It felt like metal or something, can you see it?"

"Sort of." Woojin settles back on his heels and thinks for a moment, brow furrowed. "Minho, can you pop up a quick holding bubble?"

The guy with the laptop bag snaps to attention like an eager puppy, and Chan has to shoot Jisung a quelling look to stop him from making a comment about it. "Sure! One sec." Minho scampers over to the two of them by the couch and slings his laptop onto the ground before kneeling next to Minho and making a complicated series of hand gestures.

Nothing happens at first, but then white sparks fly up from his fingers, and the next thing Chan knows there's a thin, almost translucent white bubble suspended off of the very edge of Minho's fingertips.

"Where d'you want it, boss?" Minho asks. Jisung snorts.

"Here, let me." Woojin reaches over and touches his fingertips to it, and then when he draws them away the bubble transfers over to him. It wavers a little in the air before steadying itself just barely off the tip of Woojin's pointer finger. "Can you hold the cushion open a bit wider, Chan?"

Chan kind of forgot what his name was for a second, but then nods. "Yeah, sure, here."

With the seam pulled this wide Chan can kind of see the shape inside it, nestled against the pale yellow stuffing. It's sleek silver, and thinner than he thought it would be.

Woojin gently touches the edge of the bubble to the open cushion seam. It trembles against it for a moment and Chan almost thinks it's going to pop before it sinks in on itself just enough to push through the opening.

Woojin's eyebrows furrow in concentration for just a moment but then he draws his hand back up, the bubble coming with it. Now, suspended in the center of the bubble, which has turned a pale purple color instead of its plain white, is a silver band.

"A bracelet?" Chan mutters, and Woojin gives him a considering look.

"Do you know much about charms?" He asks, and nods when Chan just gives him a hopeless shrug. "This looks like a pretty standard location tracker. It's been modified, though," he continues, and squints at the bubble, ignoring the way Minho is all but vibrating in excitement next to him. "There's something different, but I won't be able to tell what it is unless I bring it back to the labs."

"I need to figure out what's with the blood spill, too," Chan says without thinking, and shakes his head a little when Woojin looks at him. "It's, um, it's a whole thing. I need to do some research about things that require blood spill for reasons other than just injury. I know about some fae that have blood spells, and obviously vamps, but there's gotta be something else about it."

Woojin settles back on his heels, passing the bubble off to Minho, and considers Chan for a long second before his mouth twitches back up into a lopsided smile. "If you're up for it," he says, "I think it may be a good idea to have some inter-department collaboration on this one."

He shrugs when Chan frowns at him, confused. "Traces of magic and the possibility for nonhuman interference, plus there's no body to actually be able to examine. I think we're the right people for it."

Chan blinks at him, then glances just behind him to see Changbin and Jisung exchange a look before looking back to him. Jisung crosses his arms but doesn’t say anything, and Chan knows what Changbin looks like when he's curious but unwilling to actually speak up about it first.

"Sure," Chan says finally, looking back to see Woojin watching him closely. "That's a good idea."

Woojin's smile busts out into a full-on beam, which makes Chan feel like he should be squinting against the brightness of it, and he claps Chan on the shoulder with one searing-hot palm before straightening up to stand. "Sounds like a plan."

Chan sits there on the floor by the couch, watching Woojin collect up his gaggle of grad students, ignores the looks that his wolves are giving him, and feels a little bit like the universe may be making fun of him, just a little.


	2. Chapter 2

“Alright,” Changbin mutters to Jisung from behind Chan, “don’t show any weakness. They’ll get you if you do.”

“Why are their offices so much fancier than ours?” Jisung hisses back. He’s got one hand twisted in the loose fabric at the back of Chan’s shirt, knuckles pressing into his spine. “Is this where all the funding goes?”

Chan shushes them both, hyper-aware of the fact that Woojin and his crew of interns may be all the way at the other end of the hall but he has absolutely no clue how good any of their hearing is. The four of them are being very professional and pretending to talk about who-knows-what, while Changbin and Jisung try their best to give Chan a nervous breakdown on their behalf.

Still, they have a bit of a point. The hallway they’re hanging back in is clean marble tile and understated painted walls, with the occasional hanging painting. Nothing too fancy, kind of typical government-nice art, but still.

The most artistic thing they had back in their offices was a couple pictures that Felix had brought back from his students and promptly hung on their mini-fridge and taped to the edge of Changbin’s desk.

It had only been two days after their first visit to the Mina’s apartment when Chan got a call from an unknown internal phone number.

“Hello?” He answered, clicking out of one browser window of lackluster research and into another.

“Detective Bang?” The voice on the other end sounded harried but still warm, and it didn’t take too long for the pieces to match up.

“Doctor Kim, right?” Jisung’s head shoot up from where he was sitting at the edge of Chan’s field of vision and he studiously ignored him. “How are things on that side of things?”

“Oh, you know.” There was a series of concerning crashing noises on the other end of the line, and then a couple distant voices that Chan couldn’t make out. “Busy.”

“Ha, right, same here,” he replied, glancing up. Jisung was still refusing to even pretend like he wasn’t trying to listen in on his conversation, and Changbin had started drifting asleep across the room about twenty minutes ago.

“I’m sure,” Woojin replied. “Look, you should come by our wing sometime soon. You know how it is with these missing persons cases. The longer things sit stagnant the lower the chance is of recovery.” He sighed on the other side of the phone, the sound a gust of static through the old receiver. “I really can’t say we’ve made that much progress ourselves, honestly.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Woojin’s voice had gained an amused tinge at that, as if he was teasing Chan, but way nicer than that. “Do you have much on your schedule tomorrow?”

Chan took a second to perfunctorily click over to his email calendar, already knowing the answer. “Not really, nothing that can’t be put on the backburner a little. We usually do more slow-paced stuff - research for court proceedings, putting together profiles, that kind of thing. This much action is a bit out of the ordinary.”

He listened to Woojin hum and click around on his end of things, and watched Jisung finally sling himself out of his chair and move to the mini fridge to grab a new Coke.

“Tomorrow should work for us, too,” Woojin said as Jisung made a point to pass behind Changbin’s chair and jostle it enough to wake him up. “I have a reporting meeting in the morning but after eleven I’ll be free.”

“Sounds good.”

"Great!" Woojin seemed to shuffle some stuff around on his end before continuing. "Do you know how to get down here?"

"Uh. Sort of?" Chan had only ever been to the medical forensics section of the couple of buildings that made up the metropolitan police departments, and even that had been long enough ago that he couldn't remember much about it. "I'm sure we can figure it out."

"Oh, sure. Just follow the sounds of small explosions and you can't get too far off." Woojin laughed, either at himself or at someone on his end, and the sound hit Chan right in the stomach in a way that made him a little concerned about the quality of the blood bag he'd sucked down that morning. "Tomorrow at eleven, then."

"Right, um. Tomorrow at eleven."

"It's a date," Jisung chirped up across the room as Chan hung up the receiver, and grinned when Chan then shot him a look. "He's a real interesting guy, chief."

"Smells like smoke," Changbin complained, rubbing his eyes. "It makes me anxious."

Chan snorted and kicked himself back from his desk so he could stretch his legs out in front of him. "If you two aren't on your best behavior tomorrow I'm never taking you anywhere with me again."

Then tomorrow came, and Chan is already regretting his tag-alongs.

"Go woo him with your amazing deductions," Changbin finally says, nudging Chan forward with an elbow. "We'll just smile and nod."

"You two are the worst," Chan says through clenched teeth, but picks up the pace and walks up to join the rest of them at the end of the hall.

"Welcome to magic forensics," Woojin says as they approach, grinning wide enough to turn his eyes into half-moons. "I'm sure it's all really exciting," he adds self-deprecatingly, and punches a quick code into a panel near the door before pushing it open.

Chan ignores the pointed look Jisung shoots him at that, and just follows behind Woojin. He'll let the remaining five guys fight over entrance order - it seems like the kind of thing that would happen.

"It's definitely, uh, high-tech over here," he says stupidly as they walk into the main room of the wing. An entire wall was dedicated to bookshelves, while another had several flat-screen monitors embedded onto it.

Most of the screens are black, or just have the police department crest on it, but one is showing a detailed spell chart that is definitely over Chan's head, academically. The most he can get from a quick glance is that it's a naming spell, but that was about it.

The rest of the room has a few tables laid out, a row of multi-sized lockers against one wall, and a door on the far wall that Chan guesses led to Woojin's office.

The tables were piled with dusty-looking books and a few laptop computers, the chairs pushed in neatly and the surfaces of the table tops marked clearly with a variety of water stains from mugs and cups.

And, sitting suspended in that same bubble as before over the one empty table, is the silver bracelet they had found in Mina's couch.

"I guess you could say that," Woojin says, finally breaking Chan's attention away from the room and back to him. Woojin sighs a little, rubbing his eyes, and Chan carefully takes in his rolled-up sleeves and wrinkled collar. "We spent most of the past few days just trying to break down the spell on the bracelet, and honestly haven't gotten too much farther with that than we were before."

"Really?" Jisung pipes up. "Why not? Is it, like, encrypted somehow?"

"Not exactly." Woojin walks over to the bubble and picks it up carefully, holding it between the fingertips of both hands. "It's more like it's not really a standard spell type."

He regards the bubble carefully, which has turned a more stormy-gray color than the purple it was the last time Chan saw it. "It doesn't seem to follow any of the usual rules for spell composition that we learn," Woojin continues, bouncing the bubble a little between his hands. "It's something more complicated, something self-composed."

"By Mina?"

"Mina was magic-inert," one of Woojin's interns interjects - Minho, Chan remembers, after a beat. "Even if she wrote a spell like this she wouldn't have been able to put cast it on anything."

"I doubt she even wrote it," Woojin continues. His brow is furrowed in thought, and makes his profile look more striking than normal. The inner voice that Chan blames entirely on Jisung makes a loose reference to beaks, and he quickly squashes it. "It's really ridiculously complex. I'm honestly tempted to just drop the whole thing and try to focus on other things," he admits, glancing up from the bubble to Chan. "I feel like we're at a bit of a standstill, trying to figure just this part out."

"Sure, makes sense." Chan leans back just a hair as Woojin passes the bubble in front of him and over to Minho, who takes it and wanders off to another corner of the lab. "What else about the scene do they have you guys looking at?"

"General magical residue, mostly." Woojin moves to a different table, this one covered in books and looseleaf paper, and gestures for them to sit.

Chan takes a chair hesitantly, with Jisung quickly following to sit next to him. Changbin remains standing, and wanders over to squint at the spell design on the screen on the opposite wall.

Woojin's interns scatter similarly - Minho had gone off to fiddle with one of lockers, bubble floating just barely above one hand, and the other two stand uncomfortably near the table they're sitting and give Changbin a couple of looks.

"You saw the basic residue schematic, right?" Woojin asks, pushing some of the books aside to pull just one packet in front of them. Chan recognizes it quickly as the case briefing they were sent that first day, and he nods.

"It was all mostly centered around the point of disturbance in the room, right? Like, couch turned over, table broken, girl gone." He makes a gesture that implies explosion. "Poof."

"Poof." Woojin shoots him a grin before going back to the packet and flipping it to the front page where that chart is printed on the corner. "But yeah, it's your pretty standard radial model. Some kind of spellwork happened here," he says, and taps a finger against the very center of the graph, where the shading is darkest. "And then it all radiated outwards. It's actually a pretty primitive form of radiation. More accomplished spellcasters are able to control it to a much smaller radius."

"What's that mean, then?"

"Whoever cast the spell was really new at magic." Woojin lets Chan pull the packet across the table and closer to himself, and leans back a bit on his chair. "That, or they just weren't interested in controlling the residue pattern."

"Or," Changbin says from across the room, "they were in a rush." He half-turns around from the screen that he's still inspecting and shoots Chan a look. "Not all kidnappers are really interested in making sure they cover all their magical tracks. They're usually much more concerned with accidentally leaving a loose hair or a footprint or something."

"It all really makes me wish we had a more sophisticated way to fingerprint spellwork," Woojin sighs, leaning further back in his chair and crossing his arms. "We really can't do too much with this amount of residue. It's almost all gone from the apartment itself, too."

"So what next, then?"

Woojin's expression turns into a timid half-smile. It's absurdly more cute than a man their age should look, and Chan's sure his ears would be turning red if he had that kind of circulatory ability anymore. "I was kind of hoping you all would have some leads for us to go on, actually."

"Oh." Chan fiddles with the packet for a beat before shrugging. "I mean, not so much leads as things we're trying to figure out. You don't do any blood magic, right?"

Woojin actually looked a little sickened at that, mouth twisting to the side. "It's not my favorite thing," he says, hedging. "I know a little bit, but only as much as they teach you in school. Sorry to be presumptive, but I kind of thought that may be more your territory."

Jisung's spine straightens at that, and Chan interrupts before he can spout out something defending Chan's vampiric honor. "Not so much the kind of magic I'm looking to do," he says, placing a hand on the back of Jisung's chair, not touching his back but close enough that Jisung settles just a degree into a more loose posture. "I'm better at identifying blood, figuring out tainted elements, things like that. I don't really know anything about blood, like, rituals."

Woojin blinks, surprised, and Chan hears his two interns still standing near the back mutter something to each other. "Is that what you think the blood is from, then?"

"I mean, sort of? It's a guess." He flips through the packet a few times until he gets to the black and white pictures of the scene of Mina's apartment, couch tipped and table broken. There's a close-up overhead shot of the bloodstain on the floor, just to the side of the end table, and he turns the packet around to push it back to Woojin's side of the table. "The way I see it, there wasn't any other blood at the scene of the crime, right?"

"Right." Woojin takes the packet and peers down at it. "Assuming that there wasn't any attempt to cover it up, clean it up before authorities got there, and they just missed that section."

"There wasn't." Chan shrugs when Woojin shoots him a questioning look at that. "Like I said, I'm good at identifying blood. Call it predator instincts, whatever. I would have been able to smell if there was any blood spill in that apartment as recent as what was left was."

Woojin frowns a bit deeper. "Predator instincts seems a bit harsh."

"Uh. Not, like, literally - I mean, kind of literally, seeing as the whole vampire thing is a bit. You know." Chan makes fake fangs with two fingers in front of his mouth and wiggles them a bit. "I vant to suck your blood, all that jazz."

"No, I get it, just." Woojin tips his head to the side a degree, still considering Chan. "It seems harsh to narrow yourself down to a predator."

That gets Chan right in the gut and he almost misses the way Jisung snorts. "No, I know, but. Um. Never mind, just, if there was any other recent traces of blood at that apartment I would have noticed them, right?" Woojin nods slowly, giving Chan license to barrel on forward. "So, I'm thinking the blood was for some other reason."

"So they had something they needed Mina's blood for?"

"I think so. And a lot of it, seems like." Chan folds his arms on the table in front of him, leaning forward across it as he does. "If they left that much just sitting around on the floor, how much of it must they have used for whatever spell they were using it for?"

Woojin spends a long second eyeing Chan before breaking the gaze to look down at the packet once, and then over at two two interns. "Know much about blood spellwork, Jeongin?"

The younger of the two starts, posture straightening quickly as he's addressed. "Not a ton," he says, clutching the straps of the backpack he's inexplicably wearing. "It's not really in my line. I can do some research, though?"

"Would you mind?" Woojin settles deeper into his chair and rubs his eyes again. "I hope I'm not putting too much on your plate."

"No, it's fine!" Jeongin shifts from foot to foot excitedly. "I can ask my mom if she knows anything, too."

With that seemingly decided Chan watches him take off for the door at the back wall, and when he disappears through it looks back at Woojin. "His line?"

"Fae," Woojin replies, casting a fond look at the closed door. "From a nature-based lineage, so it's really impressive that he's taken this quickly to criminal investigations."

"Oh, wow. This place really is crawling with non-humans these days," Jisung says, mirroring Chan and crossing his arms on the tabletop. "HR must have a new inclusion program or something."

Chan stomps on Jisung's sneaker under the table, just hard enough for Jisung to shoot him a betrayed look and soft enough for Woojin to not seem to notice anything. "Other than the blood," he says, "I didn't really have anything else to go on. Mina's whole family are inert humans. I just don't really get why Nayeon pulled us into this."

Woojin's mouth does a funny twist at that, and he pushes the case packet away from him. "I think she's got her own hunches about suspects," he says. "I bet she wanted to make sure she had you reserved for herself so you could hit the ground running once she narrows those down."

Chan huffs. "It'd be a bit more helpful if we had any of those to go off of."

"What, you didn't like the list they included in the briefing?" Woojin grins toothily at Chan, propping his chin up with one elbow against a closed book.

The list had been twenty-plus names that Mina's parents had identified as corporate rivals or dissatisfied ex-employees. No one had wanted to touch that list.

"I wasn't very inspired, we'll say." Chan can't help but grin back. "Plus, most of them are human too. None of them are in the system, at least."

"I'm not in the system," Woojin says, shrugging a little and glancing down at the packet. "They could be noncontrolled species."

"Yeah, but... I don't know. Something about her parents just having that list together already makes me hesitant to put a lot of stock into it immediately."

"No, I agree. Nayeon should have her own shortlist soon. Honestly," Woojin continues, frowning, "it's a little strange she hasn't gotten it down yet. She usually makes pretty quick work of the background investigations and witness questioning."

"Maybe she's just waiting to give it to us until we least expect it?" Chan guesses. It honestly wouldn't be out of character - there's been times when Nayeon has sprung witness profiles to be completed on Chan just hours before a trial, just to see what his face does.

Woojin seems to agree, and he just shakes his head a couple times, smile going fond. "I'll wake up to it slipped under my apartment door tomorrow morning, I'm sure."

"Letters cut out from magazines, all ransom note style," Chan adds, grin widening when Woojin actually laughs at that. "Maybe she'll spray it with some perfume that's actually a cryptic clue to her own theory of the case."

"I would love that, actually." Woojin pushes his hair back with one hand, sighing. "I feel like we've hit a wall."

Chan nods vaguely and doesn't reach over the table to brush Woojin's hair back into place. Vampire or not, it's always a little hard to turn pack instincts off, especially when it's someone as open as Woojin seems to be. "What next, then?"

Jisung practically jumps out of his skin when a loud phone ring suddenly echoes through the lab, and Chan startles too. Woojin, for his part, doesn't look to surprised, just quietly interested as he excuses himself from the table and wanders off to the back room past the door that Jeongin disappeared through earlier.

When he leaves Chan and his two deputies are left behind with two of the grad students - Minho leaning against the wall of lockers and looking entirely fascinated by all the proceedings, and the other one looking like he would like to take his lunch break now, thanks.

Jisung breaks the silence first in order to turn in his chair and kick Chan's shins. "Nayeon's just wasting our time on this one," he says, pouting just enough to make his cheeks puff out just like they used to when they were in school together, Jisung an adorable freshman before Chan really got to know better. "Medical forensics can handle the blood spill just fine without us."

"He's right," Changbin adds, turning away from the screen across the room and wandering over to their table. "They definitely don't need all three of us, anyways."

"Is that your way of trying to get out of the case?" Chan asks, snorting when they both nod frankly. "You can go back to the office and get back to your busy schedule of googling 80's action movie trivia, if you want. That'll be an even better use of taxpayer money."

"Is that really what you two do all day?" The grad student across the room asks, one eyebrow raising from behind a pair of definitely not prescription wire-frame glasses. Chan can't for the life of him remember his name, which he should probably be more embarrassed about. "I'm glad I didn't get assigned to shadow you all, then."

"Hey, shadowing us would be a delight." Jisung cocks a finger gun at the student and pretends to shoot it, mouth angling up in a grin. "You wouldn't be able to keep up with the rapid fire speed that is the non-human casework department."

The grad student looks very firmly like he doesn't believe that, and Minho across the room laughs brightly as the door next to him opens back up and Woojin comes burning a path back into the lab.

"She _has_ to have my lab wiretapped," he says as introduction, holding his forehead with one hand as he rushes forward to grab the case summary packet back up from the table that Chan and Jisung are still sitting at. "There's no other explanation for it."

Jisung shoots Chan a look, then goes back to Woojin. "Nayeon?"

"She has a lead." He flips through the packet a few times, scanning for something, then shakes his head as he lowers it. "Mina's parents were going through her things at her apartment with the detectives, looking for anything anomalous, and they found a matchbook."

"What, a secret smoker? In _this_ city? Scandalous."

Woojin seems to either be immune to sarcasm or has just already learned that the best way to deal with Jisung sometimes is to ignore him, because he continues on as if he didn't even hear him. "It was from a bar called Undertow. Have you ever heard of it?" He directs that question to Chan, who just shrugs.

"I, uh, don't do a lot of nightlife. Curfew, and all."

Woojin blinks, seeming confused, before his expression clears and his shoulders drop in a sigh. "I forgot about that. It's ridiculous, really, you're meant to be able to be out at night, that's the whole _point_ of the sun allergy - " he breaks himself off and huffs out a sigh, hand going back to his temples, and takes a moment before continuing. "Sorry. Well, we may have to request a waiver for that, because Nayeon wants us to check this place out."

"What, all of us?" Changbin asks, moving forward to join the loose circle they've formed at the table. His hands are shoved into the pockets of his trousers, posture pointedly relaxed even though Chan can tell he's curious. "That would be quite the crew to rock up to a bar on a weekday."

"I think just a few of us would be fine." Woojin rubs his temples in small circles, looking conflicted. "Nayeon said definitely non-humans, though."

"Oh, it's one of _those_ bars." Jisung shrugs when Chan shoots him a look. "What, it's a whole genre, okay? A lot of them have specials leading up to the full moon, 'cuz they know wolves are way more impulsive with their money then."

"Is that why you borrowed so much cash from me your senior year?" Changbin asks, snorting when Jisung rolls his eyes dramatically. "You must be constantly on the brink of the moon, for how much online shopping you do. You should get that checked out."

"I was thinking just two or three of us go," Woojin continues, bravely not acknowledging the were nonsense occurring just to his side. "Maybe someone waits outside just in case things get hairy. Sorry," he adds, nodding to Jisung and Changbin, who glance at each other like they're just having the best time. "I'm really hoping to not have to flash badge or anything - this is really supposed to be more investigating than actually interviewing anyone on the case. We don't even really know how big of a connection Mina had to this place."

"Was this the only thing her parents found that they thought was suspicious?" Chan asks. "Just a bar matchbook?"

"Nayeon seemed to think there was a few things, but she wanted us on this one." Woojin shrugs. "If it is specifically a non-human bar then it begs the question of why Mina would be there at all. It's a start, I guess."

"So her rich, human, magic-inert parents found something from a non-human focused bar in their daughter's room and immediately thought that the cops should be on that one?" Changbin raises an eyebrow, jaw tight. "Sound a little biased to anyone else?"

Jisung snorts and reaches out for a high five, and Woojin nods vaguely. "They're definitely not known for their non-human activism," he says, finally taking his hand down from his temple and propping both on his hips. "Nayeon's definitely considering that they may be putting more weight on the non-human suspects. Still, it can't hurt to check this place out, ask around, see if anyone heard about her disappearance."

He looks back up at Chan. "If we can get you a curfew waiver would you go with me? Plus one of your deputies, whoever would be best to wait outside, just in case?" Woojin finally cracks a smile, and rubs at the back of his neck. "I haven't exactly been to a bar in a while either, so you wouldn't be alone in that."

Chan blinks and feels a little bit like it's unfair, that the first time he's been asked out in a while is while on the clock and looking for a disappeared quickly more-disappearing girl. He really should use more of his critical thinking in making the decision, but instead he blinks a little dumbly at Woojin's messy hair and forearms and the heat that he can feel coming off of him in waves before nodding. "Sure, but I'm not doing that paperwork."

 

Getting Chan the curfew waiver turns out to be the most simple part of the whole plan. Woojin immediately decides that they just have to go the next evening - "Time is of the essence in missing persons cases," he repeats, putting the third grad student (Seungmin, it turns out) to the task of filling out the request form for Chan while Woojin thumbs the bar's address into his phone GPS. "Nayeon will put a rush on that request if we ask her, I bet."

Nayeon does, once Chan calls her using Woojin's desk phone. "You're lucky you're going out with the forensic department's star pupil," she says, tone teasing but just enough commiserating that Chan knows not to take her too seriously. "Curfew waivers are hard enough to get approved for most regulated species, much less vamps."

"I promise Woojin can reel me in if I start giving into any of my dark urges," Chan snarks, settling back into Woojin's desk chair. It's way more comfortable than his, and he's kind of tricked himself into thinking that it still holds a little bit of that half-phoenix body heat. Good lumbar support, at any rate. "Besides, Changbin will be hanging out outside looking intimidating, just in case we need support."

"You and your wolf cronies, I love it." Nayeon sighs a little on her end of the phone, and there's a couple clicking noises from her keyboard before she speaks again. "It's all sent off, we should have a response tomorrow morning. Just assume you're good to go unless you hear from me, though. We need that bar checked out."

"Yeah, about that." Chan straightens up a little. "Is this really the biggest lead we have? A matchbook?"

"Oh, is that all Woojin said?" Nayeon's voice goes delighted in the way Chan recognizes from past cases. That's Nayeon's 'this piece of evidence is amazing and I'm about to tell you why' voice. "It wasn't just the matchbook."

"What?" Chan glances to the side, where he can see Woojin chatting to Minho and Seungmin while his wolves mess with one of the touch screens on the wall of the lab. "What else was there?"

"A _note_ ," Nayeon says, thrilled. "Handwritten and everything. The parents almost didn't even give it over to us, isn't that weird?"

"What did it say?"

"Not too much, honestly. I miss you, see you soon, XOXO. That kind of thing. But Mina wasn't dating anyone, at least not that her parents knew." Chan can practically smell the smoke from how fast Nayeon's gears are turning. "We have a Romeo and Juliet situation on our hands, I bet."

"Oh, great." Chan resists the urge to rub at his forehead, quickly realizing why Woojin kept doing it after talking to Nayeon first. "Okay, well, sounds like we're definitely looking for a contact at the bar, then?"

"That's my thinking. Just get your ears to the ground and see if you hear anything - Mina's in the news now, so if she was a regular there they'll be talking."

"Right."

"And let me know more about this bar, when you get back." Nayeon sounds a bit frustrated, for the first time in their conversation. "There's practically no information out there about it. It's like it doesn't even exist. I could barely even find it's liquor license, it's that kind of underground."

"That's weird." Chan's brow furrows, and he taps the fingers of his free hand against his knee. "Yeah, I'll touch base with you again after we go."

"Thanks." She lets out a breath before speaking again, tone brighter already. "Well, I won't keep you! Enjoy your date!"

"What - it's not - Nayeon -" is all he manages to sputter out before the phone clicks and all he hears is dial tone, and Chan spends a good long second sitting there and staring at the receiver before hanging it up and slinking back out into the lab.

Hyunjin, predictably, is thrilled to hear about the latest developments back at the pack apartment that night when Jisung and Changbin complain over pizza.

"It's totally a star-crossed lovers thing," he says, toppings dripping onto his plate as the piece he's holding droops over the table. "A secret note, that's so romantic."

"Aren't you worried about going to this bar without back up, or anything?" Felix asks, already working on his third piece as they talk. "It sounds kind of sketchy."

"He'll have plenty of backup," Changbin says, and rolls up his sleeves just as Jisung and Chan both go to slap him away. "These guns."

Jisung manages to get to him first and dumps mushrooms down the back of his shirt, making Changbin squawk and run off to the kitchen trash can and leaving space in the conversation for Chan to make room edgewise.

"Woojin seems like a pretty good magic user," he assures Felix, who still looks concerned. "We're not really doing anything other than kind of getting a feel for the place, anyways. We're not exactly trying to confront a major suspect, or anything."

"No," Hyunjin says, gesturing with his pizza. "Just a minor one."

"It'll be fine," Chan repeats, feeling a bit like he's trying to convince his parents to let him stay up past his bedtime. "Seriously, no one messes with vamps past ten PM."

"No, they just call the police on you." Jisung sighs and reaches over Changbin's still empty seat to pat Chan on the shoulder. "We're just giving you a hard time, chief, it'll go great. The phoenix seems more the type to get mugged, anyways."

"Phoenix?" Felix asks, perking up as Chan sputters. "Is that Woojin?"

"Yeah, half." Jisung takes another bite of pizza and continues to talk, cheeks bulging like a squirrel. "It's super cool, I've never heard of a half-phoenix before."

"Does he, like, do fire stuff?" Hyunjin wiggles the fingers on one hand.

"We don't really know what he does," Chan interjects, shooting Jisung a quelling look.

"Beyond running at a body temperature not unlike a freakin' volcano, yeah." Jisung mutters, before finally swallowing the bite. "I wish he'd do some fire stuff, that'd be cool as hell."

That tangent, plus Changbin's triumphant return to the table just in time to slap Jisung with a face-full of kitchen soap, proves to be enough of a distraction that the kids forget to worry about Chan for a little while.

The waiver gets approved at about four thirty in the afternoon, just late enough that Woojin starts panicking on Chan's behalf, but it does get approved.

"I'll meet you at the bus station up the street from the place, then?" Woojin asks as he prints out the certificate for Chan. "Can you and Changbin get there alright?"

"Oh yeah," Changbin interjects, slinging an arm over Chan's shoulders. "We're public transport experts."

"Great," Woojin says, although he doesn't seem to really be listening, eyes still locked on his computer screen. "I'll see you later tonight, then."

Changbin and Chan glance at each other and then nod, thoroughly dismissed. "See you then," Chan says, and they head back to the apartment together after scooping Jisung from their office.

"What are you even going to wear, chief?" Jisung finally asks as they take the bus to their street. "Raid Hyunjin's closet?"

"What?" Chan glances down at his wrinkled work shirt and slacks. "Are you saying I don't look hot as hell right now?"

Jisung and Changbin let out twin cackles, and Changbin slaps him on the back. "You're lucky this is a work thing," he says, shaking his head. "If this was an actual date you'd be toast."

Chan makes a show of pouting, earning himself more laughs from the wolves, and doesn't try to argue that this was never supposed to be any type of date, really.

All of the information they can find about Undertow - which, like Nayeon suggested, is really not much at all - seems to agree that it's pointless to show up before eleven at night.

"I'm going to be dead walking at work tomorrow," Changbin complains when they finally head back out of the apartment, leaving the rest of the pack either asleep or almost there. "We couldn't have done this on a Friday night?"

"Woojin wanted to rush it," Chan says, although he silently agrees. "Besides, it should be a little quieter there on a weekday. Easier to listen to conversations and talk to people, right?"

"Sure." Changbin settles into the seat next to the window while Chan takes the aisle seat. "We're definitely not getting out of there before the buses stop, though, huh? Can we charge a taxi to some work account?"

"I'll ask Nayeon about that after I give her all the sweet details about this place, okay? She might be in a better mood then."

"Oh, I'm definitely not asking her."

The bus ride is just over ten minutes, traffic not quite as bad as usual this late at night, and Chan spends the whole time trying not to crawl entirely out of his skin.

He'd been on curfew since he was bitten - that was almost twenty years ago, now. He can't really remember the last time he was outside of his house or apartment past dusk.

If Changbin picks up on his nerves he doesn't say anything, just leans closer across the line between their seats to press the tops of their arms together. That, plus the weight of the printed-out waiver folded up in his wallet, helps.

The bus stop, when they get there, is taken up with student-age kids milling around, looking bored with their faces lit up by the blue-white light of their phones. They barely give Chan and Changbin a glance before looking back down, and Chan privately does a mental fist-pump. He can totally pull off this whole 'totally normal human, nothing to see here' look.

He almost doesn't see Woojin at first, but next thing he knows he's right there.

"You made it!" Woojin says, grinning and resting his hands on his hips. "It's about three blocks away from here, shouldn't be too bad a walk."

Chan waves a little, and Changbin gives Woojin one look before asking, "Did you come straight from work?" 

Chan blinks, and actually takes a second to look at Woojin. He's wearing pretty much what Chan joked about wearing to this place - wrinkled long-sleeve, rolled up to the elbows, and slacks.

It looks better on Woojin, somehow, and Chan nervously pushes his hands in his jeans pockets.

Woojin actually flushes a bit, the heat he's giving off increasing even more, as if that was possible. "I wanted to put a bit more time into studying that bracelet spell," he says, pushing a hand through his hair bashfully. "Time kind of got away from me."

Changbin snorts while Chan tries not to melt in the face of everything about this. "Hope you're getting overtime, dude."

Woojin rolls his eyes but seems to take this all good-naturedly, and he leads the way down the street.

It really is a quick walk - the air is on the side of crisp and perfectly cool, and Chan can't help but kind of relish being outside while not having to worry about cloud cover, or whether his sunscreen has worn off. It's novel - if he isn't careful, he could get used to this.

Finally they slow to a pause, and Woojin frowns at the storefronts for a second. They're mostly restaurants with a convenience store on one corner, and it's late enough that the only one still lit up is the convenience store. "It says it should be right here," he says, and pulls out his phone as if to check that they have the right address. "That's weird."

Chan scans the street, turning around to look at the opposite stores as if they maybe just walked right past a bustling bar, and misses it when Changbin makes a noise and points at one of the store fronts.

"Think I got it," he says, and Chan and Woojin both turn to follow the way he's pointing.

Chan doesn't see anything at first, and wonders for a second if Changbin's werewolf night vision is coming in handy. Then, like an I Spy puzzle, or one of those vision teasers where you have to focus your eyes just right to make out the words, he sees it.

Tucked in between a dark barbecue place and the metal grate pulled over what looks like a cosmetics store is a set of stairs that lead down to the basement level of the row of buildings. A simple iron banister leads down the stairs to a dark-painted door, and as they step closer Chan can make out, printed in silver letters that glint against the streetlights, 'Undertow'.

Changbin whistles as Chan and Woojin eye the stairs. "Felix may have been right, chief," he says. "This looks a little sketchy."

Chan shoots him an exasperated look over his shoulder while Woojin shakes his head. "Not just sketchy," he says, lowly now as if they might be overheard, "magical."

Chan stops himself from trying to pull Woojin back as the other man moves closer, near enough to put one hand carefully on one of the banisters. "How so?"

"Take a closer look," Woojin says, and nods towards the door. "Anything look strange to you?"

Chan follows after Woojin after a nervous beat, and he peers at the door with squinted eyes. His night vision is better than the general human's, but just a bit lower than a were's, and there's no external lighting to indicate that this place is even open.

He blinks, then, and leans a little closer, still at the top of the stairs. The center panel of the door, about a foot across and half a foot long, shimmers, just barely, as he eyes it.

"Oh hell no," he says under his breath before thinking, and thuds down the set of stairs, leaving Woojin at the top and Changbin still standing further back on the sidewalk. "I know what this is."

He approaches the door, stomach sinking, and gives himself a minute to mentally hype himself up before reaching up and knocking briskly.

There's a long pause, and Chan hears Woojin take one step down before the enchantment on the door shimmers brighter and a voice speaks from it. "Password?"

Changbin curses lowly from up on the sidewalk and Chan talks a second to think before just deciding to go for it. He's a vamp out past curfew, and even if he has a government-granted waiver that's nothing that these guys have to know about.

"Don't have one," he says, and takes a second to let the tight control that he always keeps on his fangs waver just enough so that they drop and accidentally cut his bottom lip. "But I was hoping you'd make an exception." He grins, widely, and tries to think carnivorous thoughts.

There's a pause that feels like it lasts for hours, but must only be a few seconds, and then the voice speaks again. "And your guest?"

Chan glances over his shoulder to see Woojin still frozen at the top stair. He doesn't look particularly freaked by Chan dropping fangs, more so by the disembodied voice.

That's right, Chan thinks, he probably wasn't ever the kind of guy to frequent these types of places. Bright phoenix like him, why would he have to? "He's a guest."

The voice takes another long second to think, apparently, and Chan wiggles one hand very casually so Woojin slowly takes the last couple of steps and comes to pause just behind Chan's shoulder.

Finally, just when Chan was debating letting his teeth cut his lip more, just for the show of it, the voice speaks again. "Password this month is piranha," the voice says, and Chan hears the lock at the door click open. "Welcome to Undertow."

Chan grabs the handle before the voice can change their mind, and he hears Woojin swallow thickly behind him as he pushes the door open.

"What is this?" Woojin mutters, close enough to Chan's back that he can feel his heat searing through the t-shirt that Hyunjin had eventually pressed Chan into wearing, saying it did things for his arms.

The room that the door pushes open into is lit a low purple, just barely red-toned, and Chan can hear the opening strains of a live singer just over the low din of conversation.

"What?" he says over his shoulder, fangs pulling back up as he moves to take Woojin firmly by the elbow as they step into the bar. "Never been to a glamour den before?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW but I have SO appreciated the comments and kudos that this has received in just a week! here's chapter two - I promise you my posting schedule is not usually so regular.


	3. Chapter 3

Undertow smells like alcohol and sweat and some kind of smoke, curling through the air of the bar as Chan leads Woojin by the elbow further into the building.

He keeps to the wall, a bit, pausing in the corner by the bar which faces out onto the more open section of the room.

Just being here makes his skin crawl. Chan resists the urge to scratch, knowing it won't really help.

Woojin lets himself be tugged along, skin hot and near-scalding against Chan's fingertips. At the very least he's wearing long sleeves, so there's some kind of barrier between their skin. Chan kind of worries he'll get sunburnt, otherwise.

"Glamour den?" Woojin asks, voice hushed even though the bar is loud enough that it would be hard for anyone to overhear them. "I've - no, I've never even heard of that."

"It's pretty much what it sounds like." Chan tucks them both against the far wall. There are a few people crowded near the bar next to them but most of the occupants of the place seem to be milling around the main stretch of floor, which is furnished with a handful of small round high-top tables and some booths lining the walls.

A low stage takes up the furthest wall, and a man in a dark red shirt and black, fitted pants stands at the center mic. He's alone, other than a pianist tucked further back into the upstage shadows, and he sings a low, crooning song that Chan can't quite make out the words to.

Woojin interrupts Chan's thoughts. "That's... it's illegal to use glamour in a public setting. It’s really kind of illegal to use them at _all_."

"Right," Chan says, and finally thinks to let go of Woojin's elbow. He tucks his hands instead into his jeans pockets and tries to look casual, like he's supposed to be here. "Hence all the business at the front door."

Woojin, when Chan chances a look over at him, looks more fascinated than anything else, like a scholar suddenly given a completely new topic of study. "How did I not know these places existed? I work in law enforcement."

"Dunno. I think we like to keep things pretty quiet whenever one gets busted, though." Chan shrugs, doing a quick head count out of habit. "The thinking is that you don't want to go giving anyone else any ideas about starting up one."

He counts about fifty-five people in the room, give or take a few that he's missing, or can't see from this perspective. Most of them seem to be by themselves, or in loose groups of two or three.

"What's the point, exactly?" Woojin's voice breaks through Chan's thoughts again, and he shifts, warm and flickering just off from Chan's side. "What's the draw? Isn't this just kind of asking for someone to mug you, or something?"

Chan snorts without thinking. "I bet plenty of that happens, too." He leans against the wall and continues watching the crowd, eyebrows drawn. "I'm sure you know, though, that there's something out there for every weirdo in this city."

Woojin is silent at that, and follows Chan's eye line to look out over the bar as well.

Watching more closely, now, it's easier to pick out the people who must work for the bar in some capacity. They move a little more confidently, intercept the other patrons easily with a laugh and some offhand comment that Chan can't make out from this distance, vamp hearing notwithstanding.

They both watch a woman just past the corner of the bar walk up to a man who's nursing a beer, her heels clicking on the slick floor of the bar. She smiles sweetly, cutely, up at him and seems to introduce herself, and then places a hand gently on the curve of his lower arm where it sits propped up on the counter.

The effect isn't obvious but it is instantaneous, and Chan at least catches it right away.

The second her hand touches his bare skin the man at the bar loosens his grip on the neck of his beer, just a little, not enough to drop it completely but enough for it to fall the inch it needs to clunk against the bar top.

Woojin makes a low noise under his breath, wary, as the woman smiles wider and leans up a couple more inches to whisper something in the man's ear. He blinks, seems to shake himself a little, and then nods before finishing the last couple inches of beer and pushing himself off of the bar.

The woman slides her hand up his lower arm to his elbow, curves around it, and they walk off closer to the stage, to one of the empty booths off to the side.

Chan lets out a breath as they walk away, and he leans a little harder back against the wall. "Skin contact glamour," he mutters, "probably a fae strain."

"That's - " Woojin stops himself, and Chan glances over to see him wrap his arms around his torso, nervous. "Should we do something?"

Chan actually snorts at that, because he may not have known Doctor Kim for very long but he sure isn't surprised by that response. "Nah. Walking into a place like this is basically carte blanche for non-invasive glamouring." He pushes his hands a little deeper in his pockets and shrugs. "We can keep an eye and see if she tries anything funny, but chances are he's just here for the kicks."

"Kicks." Woojin eyes the bar, then the stage and the seating section, with lowered eyebrows. "There really are all types, I guess. People just like being glamoured?"

"Some people, sure." The bartender is starting to give them a dirty look from where she's sweeping the left over beer bottle into a can of empties, and Chan pats his back pocket to make sure he has his wallet. Investigation or not, illegal glamour speakeasy or not, he guesses it's rude to just stand in the corner and not buy anything. "That's kind of the whole point of glamour, right? That it's pleasant, in some way."

Woojin trails after Chan as he leads him over to the bar, picking a barstool on the side of it so they can still look out over the seating and the stage. "I guess that's true," he says, taking the seat next to Chan and shaking his head when Chan nods towards the bartender questioningly. "It just seems so... risky."

Chan orders a beer - he can’t, physically, get drunk, but he sure does appreciate having something to do with his hands at these kind of places - and pays the bartender before turning back to Woojin.

"It is risky," he says, taking a perfunctory sip and leaning on his elbow so he can see around Woojin's profile towards the stage. "But it's risky for the people who come here who use their glamour, too. The place gets busted and that's basically an immediate arrest for who knows how many counts of violating some section of the restricted species act."

Woojin hums, still clearly nervous, and rests both hands on his thighs. "Why come here, then? Money?"

"Some of them, sure." The woman they were watching before is sitting across the table from the man, now, at one of the booths. She's holding his hand between both of hers, and they're talking lightly, friendly. "For others... I don't know. I, uh, don't exactly use my glamour very much, for obvious reasons, but some people might see it as part of who they are. Something intrinsic. They may be tired of suppressing that part of their, like, person. Places like this give them both the space for it and consenting partners."

Woojin shifts in his seat to turn and face Chan a little more fully, and his concentrated regard still hits Chan a little hard in his stomach. "I forgot you have glamour. Is that why they let us in without the password?"

Chan swallows nervously and takes another pull from his beer, just to look away from Woojin's concerned eyes and pulled-together brow. "Probably," he says after swallowing, and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. "I bet they don't get too many vamps here, we're way too restricted for that. Seems like it's mostly various fae-types, that kind of thing."

He laughs, a little, and shrugs. “Maybe they think I’m exotic.”

Woojin doesn't turn away, just frowns a bit harder. "What I don't get," he says, "Is why Mina was coming to this kind of place."

Chan had almost forgotten why they were here, in the confusion of it all. "Right," he replies, pushing the beer a little further away from him and folding his hands together on the bar. "This makes the note even more suspicious, though, right?"

Woojin blinks, and then nods quickly. "That's right," he says, and taps on his jaw thoughtfully with two fingers. "I'd forgotten about that."

"Isn't it kind of the larger point of this whole clue?" Chan asks, going for teasing and absolutely loving the way that Woojin snorts out a laugh that's almost a giggle, eyes curving up around his smile.

"Probably," he admits, shrugging and resting his elbows on the bar. "I - this is going to sound stupid," he prefaces, grin turning a shade self-conscious. "But it just seems... very personal. I don't like digging in people's relationships like that."

Chan laughs out loud at that, and privately is grateful for the combination of music and voices that makes the bar noisy enough to drown him out. "You work in criminal investigations," he says. "Sometimes that requires some relationship digging, even if it seems nosy."

Woojin shrugs good-naturedly, almost bashfully. "I know, but still. We would have come here anyways, regardless of if there was a note or not."

"Yeah, but now it seems like we may have a glamour-date of hers to look out for." Chan props an elbow on the bar, then balances his chin on his hand. "A glamour-date, possibly fae, who might definitely know the kind of magic to poof Mina out of her apartment."

Woojin nods absent-mindedly, glancing back out over the seating area and the stage, where the man in the red shirt has finished singing and someone else is quickly adjusting the microphone stand. "Someone close enough to her to know her security code, maybe," he muses under his breath.

"Oh shit, yeah." Chan pulls the beer bottle close enough again so he can pick at the label, brow furrowed. "Wonder if they keep track of who they admit into this place, so they know who knows the passwords? Is that something that we could ask about?"

"Might give away our position a little quick," Woojin mutters, tapping his fingers against the bar in time to the pianist who plays the opening chords for the new singer as she takes her place by the mic stand. "I wonder if we might be able to overhear anything if we talk to the other glamour types, if they're here more often."

"It all really depends on how frequently she was here," Chan replies, focused in on getting the corner of the label peeled off cleanly. "If it was just a one-off thing the other person may have given her the note just to try to get repeat business. She worked a full-time job and kept her apartment pretty nice, had a whole social life. I would be surprised if she was coming out past midnight to sketchy bars like this more than once a week, if that."

Woojin doesn't reply, and Chan takes that as license to just continue on rambling. Goodness knows he's good enough at it - his wolves usually resort to just shoving him off of chairs to get him to shut up when he really gets on a tangent. "If the note writer gave her it as just a one-off thing it makes more sense why it was in a matchbook, kind of a keepsake. If they already had a long-standing relationship, long enough for them to know her _security code_ , it would have probably just been the note, right? No need to bother with anything else."

He huffs and finally gets the whole beer label peeled off, and the bartender shoots him another look as he kind of sheepishly leaves it off to the side and takes another quick sip. "I dunno," he says finally. "The main thing is going to be if we can find this person. If they haven't disappeared completely off the face of the earth, and if they _didn't_ have anything to do with this, then they should want to cooperate with the investigation."

There's just a long enough pause then for Chan to realize that, maybe, it's a little weird that Woojin hasn't answered by now.

Then, Woojin half-collapses against Chan's side.

Chan starts and reacts just fast enough to grab Woojin before he manages to slip completely off of his stool.

"Fuck, what," he sputters out as he quickly wraps an arm around Woojin's shoulders, using his leverage to push him back up into a fairly-straight seated position. He uses his other hand to grab Woojin's which have both fallen limply off of the counter. "Jesus, are you okay?"

Woojin doesn't answer, and Chan has to physically lean forward over the bar counter and in front of Woojin's chest to get a good look at his face.

Chan's stomach sinks almost immediately, and he takes a quick second to list off every good curse word he knows in his head. Woojin's eyes are completely glassed over, and he hasn't gone entirely limp but it's a close thing.

He looks glamoured out of his fucking mind, and Chan's stomach roils at the sight.

There's just enough structural support in Woojin's positioning left for Chan to be able to kind of scoot over and use his side as a crutch for Woojin to lean into. "Hey, snap out of it," he hisses, wracking his brain for species that can use glamour at this kind of long distance.

The bartender looks up from where she's drying a few wine glasses and she snorts at the sight of the two of them. "It's usually a good idea to get your date to the booths by the time Jihyo sings," she says, as if any of these words mean anything to Chan, and places the glass in her hands off to the side to finish drying. "Might want to get him over there before he just falls clean onto the floor."

Chan blinks, open-mouthed, at her for a moment before her words finally register and his stomach drops even more into his feet. "Fuck. The singer?"

Woojin shifts a little against his side, and Chan adjusts him a hair before looking over - following Woojin's line of sight - to the stage.

The woman singing now is definitely pretty enough to be fae, with loosely curling dark brown hair that rolls down over her shoulders. She has one hand wrapped loosely around the mic stand and an almost husky voice, and when she sings there's just a note of sadness, of some kind of nostalgia, in between the words to a song that Chan vaguely recognizes.

There's also way more than just a note of glamour in her singing.

"Oh shit," Chan finds himself muttering, moving his arm from Woojin's shoulders to wrap tighter around his waist, which does double-duty of making Woojin a little steadier in his seat and also combatting the goosebumps that have sprung up on Chan's skin with Woojin's frankly ridiculous amount of body heat. "Siren."

Sirens are - not bad news, really, or at least not in any way that Chan is exactly qualified to speak to. He drinks blood. That's a little higher on any bad news scale.

They're powerful, though, and rare enough that actually meeting one is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal, much less hearing one sing. He vaguely remembers learning a little bit about their clan history in school, but the topic had been mostly brushed off in favor of the more applicable history of the general mer population.

Chan grinds his teeth together and slips off of the stool to stand up against Woojin's side, hand clenched on his waist. Woojin, for his part, isn't really putting up much of a fight against Chan's general manhandling, and moves easily enough as Chan tugs him to turn around, away from the stage, and face Chan.

"Hey, my guy," Chan finds himself saying, snapping in front of Woojin's eyes with the hand that isn't keeping him sitting upright on the stool. "Let's try getting you out of this, huh?"

Woojin blinks blearily at him and doesn't make any kind of outward sign that he's heard him. He just sways, a little, in time to the siren's song, a faintly pink flush crawling up to his ears.

"How long does she sing for?" Chan barks over to the bartender, who is watching this whole thing go down like it's the funniest shit in the world.

"Oh, she does a whole set." The bartender shrugs and tucks a piece of dyed-red hair behind her ear, which is characteristically pointed at the tip. Fae, too. That explains why she hasn't fallen over in a heap of glamoured limbs. "Jihyo's only here every other week or so, these days. It's a special occasion."

Chan groans and turns back to Woojin. "Okay, don't be mad at me," he mutters, cursing internally when Woojin just blinks sweetly back at him and the length of his eyelashes makes Chan want to touch them, sort of, in a weird way. "I haven't done this in a really long time."

He takes in a bracing breath and then moves his free hand to grip the side of Woojin's jaw, just enough to make sure that he's making eye contact. "Let's see if we can't shove the siren out of that brain of yours, huh?"

Then, with a quick prayer that this isn't stumbling into an HR violation that'll end up on Nayeon's desk tomorrow, and the second it takes to drop fangs, Chan pushes as much glamour as he possibly can into his eyes.

Glamouring is fucking weird. It's Chan's absolute least favorite part of the whole vamp situation, other than the blood thing, obviously. It takes a kind of meditative visualization that he didn't really get a handle on until his later teenage years, not that he was using it very much.

Glamour, as a concept, is different for each species. Vampire glamour was evolutionarily developed primarily as a method for calming down one’s next meal so they didn’t just bleed out from nerves, to be perfectly factual. It took a kind of mental flick of a light switch, but then it was just _on._

Chan stops himself at the last second from licking his lips nervously, conscious of his fangs bumping up against his bottom lip now, and presses his thumb just a hair more firmly into the skin at Woojin's temple. "Hey bud," he says, voice weird and lispy from his teeth. "C'mere, don't listen to her, look at me."

Woojin takes a second for his eyes to focus on Chan's, gaze kind of distant as he listens to the singing through the speakers, but after a little more pressure from Chan's thumb he blinks and makes eye contact. There's a weird tugging in the corner of Chan's mind where he's mentally installed the light switch for this, and Chan grits his teeth and pulls at it like it's tug of war.

Siren glamour is famously tough to break - it fades instantly when they stop singing, but for the time that the song is going on there's almost no way to cut off the glamour other than getting ear plugs in the person, and even that's not a sure thing.

Vampire glamour, though. That shit is built for survival.

Chan can feel the moment that Woojin tips over into his glamour like a thread pulling taut, and he clenches his teeth even tighter as the other man lists forward like he wants to fall against Chan's chest.

"Nuh-uh, you stay right there," he manages to mutter through his teeth, steadying Woojin with the hand at his waist. "No funny business."

Woojin actually grins at that, another sign that he's been firmly yanked away from the siren glamour and into Chan's. "None at all?" he asks, and props his wrists over Chan's shoulders lightly.

Chan laughs stiffly and definitely ignores the little thrill in the pit of his stomach at how close Woojin is, how much he's suddenly smelling like burnt incense and sunshine. "Okay handsy, glad to see that you're back in the realm of understanding spoken language at least."

Woojin's smile widens, clever and slow, and he tips his head to the side a degree. "Glad to be back," he says, and if Chan didn't already know that he was glamoured out of his mind the way he bares the side of his throat casually, showing off the angle where his neck and shoulder meet, would be a dead giveaway.

Fucking glamour. Chan's going to die, again, right here on this sticky bar floor. "Yeah, none of that. We're gonna try snapping you out of all this, how about that?"

Woojin actually pouts, which is first of all ridiculous, and second of all cute as hell. "This is nice, though," he mumbles, and his arms inch just a little bit further over Chan's shoulders as he presses in closer. "We've got all night."

Okay, yeah, they have to get the fuck out of here if this is going to be the rest of Chan's night. "Nope, don't think so, would rather not bring you back to your grad students completely glamour-wasted." Chan delicately takes Woojin's hands off his shoulders and pulls them down to keep them very still, thanks, in between their bodies. "Look deep into my eyes," he says, half as a joke and half because Woojin has started eyeing their hands like he's planning on doing something about it.

Woojin follows instructions well, even like this, though, and Chan gives him a tense smile as Woojin blinks heavily at him. "Like a light switch," he mumbles under his breath, gripping Woojin's hands tightly and ignoring the way that every part of his more suppressed instincts are telling him to just take this very handsome, very willing guy back to one of the booths and have a quick snack. "Switch it off."

It takes some doing. Cutting off glamour before actually drinking from someone is kind of against the very nature of the glamour itself, and Chan has to take a few hard blinks as if to try and physically cut a cord that's stringing in between his eyes and Woojin's.

He gets there, though, and after a few more blinks he can feel that corner of his mind, dusty from disuse, fade off again as the faint sense of connection between him and Woojin drops away.

The siren's still doing her thing, so Chan watches carefully as Woojin's eyes go fuzzy, then sharpen, waiting for the siren song to grab him again.

It doesn't, thank god. It had kind of been a last ditch effort, but Chan knew a little about glamours interacting and counteracting with each other, at least academically. Pulling Woojin out of one glamour and into another, and then dropping that second glamour, hypothetically might give him a little wiggle room of resistance for a little bit.

Especially if he doesn't listen too closely for the rest of the night.

Chan drops Woojin's hands as he watches him come back to himself. He takes a quick step back, putting just a little more breathing room between them, about as far as he can get until he bumps up against his stool. "How you doing there?"

Woojin looks at him blankly, although his eyes are sharp and focused enough that Chan knows that he's not still glamoured, and then his ears and neck go a deep, burning red. "Oh," he breathes out, and presses his palms quickly to the sides of his neck. "Oh, wow."

Chan shifts nervously on his feet. "You alright now? We, uh, should probably get going, or at least see if there's somewhere we can get away from the singing for a little bit. I've probably bought you some time," he continues, watching as Woojin drops his eyes from Chan and down to the floor, hands still covering up the flush up his neck. "But she's gonna be singing for a while, I think, and I don't really want to do that whole process again."

Woojin takes a second before responding, and Chan silently curses himself for letting Woojin get that far into the siren song without noticing in the first place.

"I'm fine," he finally says, voice thick with something before he clears his throat on a cough and lowers his hands down, away from his neck. "Um, thanks. For getting me out of that."

"Sure, what are vampire detective partners for?" Chan jokes, nervously eyeing the way that Woojin's shoulders have tensed up. "Is - I'm sorry that that was, like, way inappropriate. I kind of panicked."

"No, um, I get it, it's fine." Woojin shrugs and finally looks back up at Chan, although his eyes skitter off to the side pretty quickly the next moment. "That - I guess I can kind of see the draw that these kind of places can have, sort of."

"What, really?" Chan takes the opportunity to hop up back on his stool, glancing quickly back over at the singer. She's finished up a song, thank god, and is taking a drink of water. The rest of the patrons in the bar pick up volume a little as the effects of the song wears off for now. "Sirens are pretty intense, although I can't say I've ever experienced it."

"Oh, the siren glamour was awful." Woojin makes a face, and puts one hand to his stomach. "Like all the worst parts of being drunk, and also seasick. Yours, uh, was better, though."

Chan blinks at him, dumbstruck. "Oh."

"Just," Woojin continues quickly, shaking his hands a bit and looking worried. "Like, I could definitely do without all the weird brainwashing bits. I guess I could just see how it would make things like biting way easier."

Chan feels an eyebrow raise incredulously. "You're taking the whole 'I just got hypnotized by a blood-sucking monster' thing pretty smoothly."

That gets a laugh, and it's amazing how much just that sound settles Chan's nerves. "Hey, I could actually understand words. That's a good step above the siren thing, at least." Woojin's smile softens but doesn't fade, and he regards Chan thoughtfully. "Quick thinking. You seem to be just fine with the singing, though?"

"Oh, totally, do not even worry, my dude." Chan grins and shoots Woojin a thumbs up. "Most species with glamour capabilities are immune to other natural glamours. It's a little different with, like, actual magic charms and stuff like that, but I can handle a siren song or a fae touch, no problem."

He nods over to the bartender, who's moved on to serving a small pack of salary men who look like they're taking the brief break in being glamoured into a pile of jello to get a refill. "I think most of the staff here are like that, too, or else they would be a mess with a siren singing like this."

Woojin hums to himself and nods, glancing around the room again. "Makes sense," he mutters under his breath, twisting to get a good look at the stage. "She could get in some really big trouble, though, if anyone reported that she was singing like this."

Chan frowns, mouth twisting, and he leans an elbow on the bar counter. "Seriously. Siren song is super off-limits. You get, like, _a_ strike, and law enforcement doesn’t really take that policy seriously once you’re older than 18. She has guts."

They both watch as the singer returns her bottle of water to the foot of the mic stand before straightening up again. She adjusts the angle of the mic just a touch, then sweeps her hair back from her face and turns around to say something to the pianist accompanying her.

"She doesn't really seem the hardened criminal type," Chan finally says, and Woojin snorts in agreement.

"She looks more like an elementary school teacher, or something." Woojin folds his arms in front of his chest. "How do you think she ended up here?"

They're interrupted by the siren - Jihyo, Chan remembers from talking to the bartender - as she steps back over to the mic and smiles out at the crowd.

"Thanks, as always, for the amazing response," she says, smiling wider when her words are met with a few stray hoots from the audience. "I can't tell you all how important it was for me to be back here and singing for you this week."

She takes a breath in and holds the stand loosely with one hand as she blinks out past the stage lights. "I won't be doing a full set tonight," she says, grinning apologetically when that announcement is met with some disappointed voices. "Don't exactly have it in me. Things have been... tough, right now, in my life outside of Undertow, so it was great to be back. Always good to have some stability, right?"

Jihyo nods to herself as the bar patrons mutter amongst themselves a little, and she drifts a little from foot to foot. Woojin shoots Chan a look over his shoulder.

"Anyways," Jihyo says, brushing her hair out of her face and behind her shoulders one more time. "I'll probably be back to sing again in a week or so. In the meantime, have a great evening, and tip your servers!" She punctuates that with a grin and a wink, and the audience erupts into a round of applause as she grabs her water bottle off the floor and disappears into the dark backstage.

Chan watches her go, torn between relieved that she isn't singing anymore and a little disappointed. He had spent the whole other song panicked over Woojin, he hadn't actually been able to listen to her sing. He's always a fan of supporting the arts.

Woojin, on the other hand, jumps off of his stool the second the siren leaves the stage. "We have to go find her," he says, reaching out to tug at Chan's elbow and almost pull him clean off of his own seat. "She definitely knows about Mina."

"What?" Chan goes easily enough, grabbing his phone off of the bar at the last second from where he had kept it out, just in case Changbin tried to get in touch with them. "You think?"

"It's a hunch, maybe, but worth checking out." Woojin is already taking off through the main seating area of the bar, and Chan has to scramble to keep up.

"Are we full on FBI search warrant-ing this situation?" Chan asks, swerving around a high top table with a group of women standing around it, giggling at each other. "How do you plan on getting back there?"

Woojin throws a look over his shoulder and grins at Chan. "I was kind of hoping my natural charm would suffice."

Predictably, there is a bouncer of sorts standing in front of a doorframe off to the side of the stage. The door itself just has a thick, dark curtain hung in front of it, and it sways as he straightens at their approach and gives them a suspicious once-over.

"Can I help you?" he asks as they come to a stop in front of him. He folds his arms over his chest and looks menacing, something which is very impressive considering he's a little shorter than Woojin and seems to be emitting glitter. "Employees only past this point."

"We were just hoping to speak to that last singer for a moment," Woojin says, giving the bouncer the full, uncensored brunt of his smile. Chan sympathetically feels for the guy - he's probably blinded now. "We don't need long."

The bouncer actually blinks and seems to consider it before shaking his head and glaring full-strength at them. "Yeah, I don't think so. There's a lot of creeps here that want to 'just speak to' Miss Park, thanks."

Chan does his best to smile completely non-threateningly, and nudges up to Woojin's side. "You can even chaperone us," he says. "Make sure we don't, like, try to propose to her or anything."

The bouncer looks from Woojin to Chan and then blanches. "Sure, buddy, I'll just let a bloodsucker back to see her." He gestures at Chan with his chin, scowling. "Put those things away, or I'll have to ask you to leave."

Chan blinks and very consciously touches the tip of his tongue to his teeth. "Oh," he mutters, and takes a second to focus and draw his fangs back up.

He hadn't even noticed he still had them down from when he glamoured Woojin. That thought, plus the fact that Woojin didn't seem to notice them either, sits somewhere weird in his chest.

Woojin doesn't spare Chan a glance before carrying right on, though, and Chan honestly has to give him credit for the quick thinking (and hard-assed-ness) at this point. "It's super quick," he says, holding up both hands as if to show that he's not here to mess around, no suspicious things here, thanks. "We just - we have some more information for her about Mina."

Chan twitches and looks at Woojin, but Woojin just keeps staring straight ahead at the bouncer.

The bouncer, for his part, just looks more confused. "There's no Mina working here," he says, and takes a step forward towards them. "I think you two got a little song-happy. Maybe go back over there and take a breather," he says, and nods back towards the tables and booths. "No bothering Miss Park."

Just as Chan's hand is itching to go for his badge, the curtain behind the bouncer slams open, almost decking him completely off of his feet.

It narrowly misses, though, thanks to the one step forward that he took, and all three of them look back to see Jihyo standing, eyes wide and a little blood-shot, with one hand gripping the door frame and the other one twisted in the fabric of the curtain.

She takes a second to look over the three of them, eyebrows lowering and confused, before settling on Woojin and Chan. "Did you say you knew more about Mina?"

She pushes past the bouncer before they can even answer. He takes a step back in confusion, but she ignores him and presses up into Woojin's space. "Did they find her? Is she okay?" She actually grabs Woojin by the arms at that, and for all that he has several inches on her she suddenly seems like a larger presence than should be possible. "Please, her parents won't tell me anything, is she okay?"

Woojin doesn't answer immediately, just takes a second to smile calmly at her before carefully shaking free of her hands. "Miss Park Jihyo," he says, and uses his now-free right hand to grab his wallet from the pocket of his wrinkled work trousers. "I'm sorry, but we would like to bring you in for questioning in the case of the disappearance of Myoui Mina."

Chan watches, stunned, as Woojin unfolds his wallet to show her his badge and police ID card. "If you come calmly and willingly we will hold you just for the time it takes for questioning to the utmost requirements for the case. If you don't come willingly," he continues, and Chan watches as the blood that had been sitting high in the apples of Jihyo's cheeks sinks down, leaving her pale and even more wide-eyed, "we will have to bring you in on charges of public performance of siren song, under the restricted species act."

Woojin sighs a little and shrugs at her, looking entirely disappointed for even having to bust out his police voice. "We'd all rather the first option, I think."

Jihyo stands there, frozen, weight set back in her heels rather than up in her toes the way it had been when she first got into Woojin's face. She blinks at him a few times, then glances at Chan and the freshly scabbed-over cuts on his bottom lip from all the nonsense at the front door, then looks back at Woojin.

Finally, after a tense moment where Chan actually worries that she might try to run, Jihyo lets out a long, shaking breath. "I'll come with you," she says, voice thinner and more strained than Chan has heard it be this whole evening. "But I swear, if this whole thing doesn't end with her found and safe..."

She breathes out again, shoulders drooping lower and bringing up one hand to press at her temples. "I'm going to be pissed."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of a shorter chapter this week but so much goes down that I just had to break it off there. The plot thickens....... and so does my absolute joy over how well received this fic is so far! Thank you to everyone who has commented and left kudos, you all are the reason that I've been able to crank out updates this fast!


	4. Chapter 4

They end up calling a cruiser to give Jihyo a ride back to her home, an apartment a little across the city.

“You don’t think she might be a run risk?” Changbin asks in low tones as he and Chan wait outside on the sidewalk, keeping an eye on the steady stream of Undertow patrons who heard tell that the police were on the way and took very quickly towards the exit. “Wouldn’t it be smarter to just bring her into the station tonight?”

“Woojin doesn’t think so, and Nayeon told me to defer to him,” Chan responds. Nayeon hadn’t been too happy to be woken up when he called her work cell, and she’d been pretty short with the whole thing. “I don’t really think it’ll be an issue, either. You didn’t see her in there. She seems pretty torn up about Mina’s disappearance.”

He shifts against the wall that they’re both leaning against, and shrugs a little. “I figure that if she thinks she stands even a chance of helping us find her, she won’t go anywhere.”

Woojin met the officer who brought the cruiser down at the curb and is still talking to him, one elbow propped on top of the open passenger's side door and the other hand on his hip.

Chan watches as he laughs at something the officer says and then turns to the side to direct a soft grin at Jihyo, who's wrapped up in a jacket and looking very quietly furious.

"We're really not pressing charges to this place either?" Changbin asks, and Chan looks away and back to him. Changbin folds his arms and snorts, apparently amused by Chan's complete inability to focus on anything right now. "Places like these are a fire waiting to happen. Why aren't we busting them?"

"Not really our area, I guess." The manager and a few of the staff at Undertow had been quick to demand information from Woojin after he pulled his badge on Jihyo, panicked that they were about to be shut down. In the end Nayeon had told them to pass the info on to the appropriate office, but otherwise ignore it. "I figure we're lucky to have been able to find such a good witness it the first place, so Nayeon doesn't want to scare everyone off too quickly. We might have to come back here to question more people too, if any of them knew Mina at all."

Changbin grunts but cedes the point, and they both watch as Woojin exchanges a few, low words with Jihyo before letting her fold herself into the back of the squad car and pull the door shut. After a beat the car pulls away from the curb slowly, and Woojin watches it go before turning back around and spotting the two of them lurking in the shadows like total creeps.

"That went about as well as can be expected, huh?" he asks, trotting up to them and clapping his hands together once. "We'll have an officer pick her up tomorrow morning and bring her in. I'm sure Nayeon and her people will want the first crack at her, but I'm pretty sure you guys at least will get a chance too, her being a non-human and all that."

"You're really perky for a dude who looks like he's about to fall asleep standing up any second now," Changbin interjects dryly. "Couldn't they give you a ride home too?"

"Oh." Woojin blinks, seeming taken aback, and then looks like he actually does a quick inventory of himself. "I don't really live on the way there, or back to the station," he says, and pats his pockets before pulling his phone out. "I was actually thinking about calling a cab. Would you two want one?"

"We'll take the bus," Chan says before Changbin can answer, and shrugs when the both of them look at him. "Dunno if a cab driver will take us, with me looking like this."

They both take him in, as if noticing the blood on his mouth and the way that the darkness and fluorescent lights of the 24-hour convenience store nearby make his skin look almost translucently-pale. Chan knows, without having really experienced this before, that the second a cab driver spotted him they'd be demanding for his ID card, then peeling away before he could get a word in edgewise, curfew permit be damned.

Changbin laughs after a beat of that, but Woojin just looks more concerned.

"I'll make sure he gets home safe," Changbin says, slapping Chan on the back and turning towards Woojin. "You get some sleep, doc. I'm sure you'll be in first thing tomorrow anyways."

"Right." Woojin blinks a few times, and it actually seems like it takes more effort than it should for him to open them again. "Well, I'll see you tomorrow then." He takes one step back before pausing and directing a careful, almost shy grin at Chan. "Thanks for everything."

Chan's stomach actually does a flip, because he's decided this is definitely physiologically possible, and he stammers out something like, "Thanks, you too, good night," before Woojin wanders off, unlocking his phone and dialing a few numbers as he goes.

When Chan gets the guts to look over at Changbin he's giving him the most shit-eating grin, of course, and then earns himself an elbow in the gut for some reason. "What the hell, chief," Changbin hisses, still grinning crazily as they both take off to the bus stop they first got off at. "Was that a date or what?"

"What," Chan responds dryly, checking the time on his phone as they walk. The next late bus should be getting there in about fifteen minutes - perfect timing. "Don't get weird, it was just - kind of crazy in there. Honestly it was a good thing I was able to get a permit and come out with him. If it was anyone else we wouldn't have had a chance of getting Jihyo."

"Why, what happened?"

He ends up recounting the whole thing - the glamour dates they'd seen, the instantaneous work of Jihyo's song to essentially turn all of Woojin's bones to jell-o, the way Chan had needed to charm him himself to break him out of it at all - in the time it takes for the bus to pull up screeching at the stop and for the two of them to board.

The slide into seats near the back and Changbin looks entirely stunned at the story, which, yeah, it's a pretty insane thing now that Chan's had more than a second to think about it.

"You _glamoured_ him?" Ends up being what Changbin stutters out in the end.

"Yeah," Chan says, already defensive for no reason. "I - we didn't know how long Jihyo's siren song was going to be in effect, okay, and I needed him to not just be a lump while we were trying to investigate things."

Changbin sits back in his bus seat, bony knees propped up against the back of the seat in front of them because he likes to impersonate a folding chair in his free time. "Damn, chief, that's intense. I mean," he continues, when Chan shoots him another warning look, "I've _never_ known you to glamour anyone. Ever! So give me a second to take in this fuckin' crazy news."

"It's not that crazy," Chan mutters, folding his arms and looking across the aisle out the opposite window. "It worked, anyways."

"Well of course it did, you're the most talented vamp I've ever had the pleasure to meet."

They fall into comfortable silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the rumble of the bus along the dark streets, the only other people in it the driver and an old man who looks like he's falling asleep all the way at the front handicapped seats.

Finally, as they approach the stop nearest their apartment and Chan starts needing to shake himself awake so they won't miss it, Changbin speaks up again. "He seems like a good guy, though. Doctor Kim," he clarifies, although it wasn't really needed - Chan could tell who he was talking about.

Everyone kind of gets the same warm, fond tinge to their voice when they talk about Woojin. Chan's a little embarrassed that he's even noticed this, but he's quickly figuring out that his sense of self-preservation probably died along with his whole mortal human body, ages ago.

"He is, I think," he replies instead, pressing the button to get the driver to stop and stretching his legs out into the aisle, knees cracking as he straightens them.

"Right, just - you know there aren't many people who would get glamoured by a vamp and not totally freak out afterwards, right?"

The bus rolls to a stop and they get out, Changbin quick on Chan's heels. "Yeah, I know."

"Right."

They fall back into silence in the quick walk to their apartment building, and in the trip up to their floor, and in Changbin fumbling with his keys to unlock the front door.

Just as Chan's stumbling out of his shoes and heading towards one of the hall bathrooms to wash up before passing out, Changbin pipes up one more time. "You know the pack wouldn’t be all weird about you seeing anyone, right?"

When Chan looks over at him, because he just has to, Changbin's hanging around the kitchen counter. He avoids Chan's eyes by looking very intently at the shared calendar they hang on the refrigerator, but Chan can see the way his ears and neck are starting to go red.

He doesn't comment on it, though, and just gives Changbin one last shake by the back of his neck before turning back around to head to the bathroom. "I know, dude. Don't worry."

 

Their apartment is never anything like 'quiet', so Chan wakes up pretty easily close to six in the morning the next day.

He does give himself a few minutes to lie face-down in his pillow, listening idly to the noise of Felix getting ready to head out to work while Jisung bothers him in the kitchen.

Five guys living in an apartment - it's never really been a thing that made sense, especially considering they never ended up springing for one of the larger models that were designed especially for pack situations like theirs. All of those models ended up being too expensive for a salary pool that included one teacher and one student, or they were too far away from at least one of their various jobs or schools.

Besides, they had always been good at living out of each other's pockets. Still -

Chan rolls over and stares at the ceiling of his room. He'd been all but forced to take the one single in the apartment - Jisung in particular had been vocal about that, saying they all felt more comfortable with the pack head taking it rather than any of them, and he was the oldest anyways.

He sighs, and imagines that he can see the dark cloud of his breath, full of anxiety, float up towards the ceiling.

What Changbin had said last night had pushed some buttons that he didn't realize he actually had. Chan, for all that he liked to think he took pretty easily to the pack head position, wasn't actually were by any stretch of the imagination. He didn't have those instincts, much less the shared history and understanding of culture that the rest of the guys had.

Maybe he was doing something wrong, letting them live on top of each other for so long the way they had been. Not letting them develop their own independence, or something. It made something in Chan's shoulders itch, hackles that he didn't have rising, at the thought of moving them all out into their own places, though.

Either way.

He rolls back over until he's rolling out bed, and then he's shuffling out of his room and down the hall towards their small kitchen.

"Yo," Jisung says once he sees Chan, even though he probably heard him coming once he stumbled out of bed. "Sleeping Beauty arises."

"'Morning, boss," Felix pipes up as well from where he's peering into their overcrowded fridge. "How'd things go last night?"

"Changbin came bursting into our room at like three in the morning, totally ruined my beauty sleep." Jisung claps Chan on the shoulder and slides him an empty mug across the counter, then nods towards their rumbling coffee maker. "I'm surprised to see you up this early, honestly."

"Changbin didn't tell you? We've got ourselves a witness to question."

Jisung's mouth actually hangs open at that, and stays that way for the next few minutes while Chan doctors his coffee just how he likes it and puts off grabbing his actual breakfast out of the freezer.

Finally, after no doubt catching a few flies - "You guys actually found a lead?" Jisung scrambles to follow Chan as he pads out of the kitchen in his sock feet and collapses into the corner of their couch, where Jisung quickly pins him in by sitting solidly next to him. "At that place? It sounded like such a dump, I figured there was no way Mina had ever actually been there."

"I thought so too," Chan grunts, letting Jisung stick his bare toes underneath Chan's thighs. "Turns out Mina's got a whole life her parent's didn't know about, and it involves glamour dens."

"Holy shit!" Jisung hushes himself when Chan shoots him a look, but he barrels on, volume barely lowered. "That shit's intense! Who's the new witness?"

"Siren." Chan snorts at Jisung's impressed whistle, and grins as Felix wanders over to perch on the back of the couch and listen in while half-hazardously eating some yogurt. "We didn't get the chance to talk to her too much last night, so about all we know right now is she's a siren, she sings at this bar, and she was pretty upset that Mina was gone."

"Shit." Jisung settles back into the couch cushions, shoulders drooping a little underneath his ratty concert tee he'd gotten back in college. "We're heading in early then, right?"

"I don't think we need to rush too much." Down the hall a door opens, and Jisung and Felix both twitch their heads just a degree towards the sound before settling back down, eyes never leaving Chan. "Nayeon gets first shot at her, and I'm sure she'll take ages. I figure if we try getting in touch with her around the afternoon she may let us bust in and ask a few questions."

Hyunjin wanders out of the hall now, hair a mess and face still creased from the wrinkles on his pillow. He wiggles a few fingers at them and promptly collapses in the free space on the couch, pressing his face into Jisung's back between his shoulder blades. "Are we having a meeting? Why's everyone up so early," he mumbles into Jisung's t-shirt, the sound muffled.

"Just catching up on all the hot new crime developments." Jisung shifts enough that Hyunjin can fall down completely onto his lap, where he just kind of curls up like he's fine going right back to sleep here, thanks. "Chan's hot date ended up being pretty useful after all."

"It wasn't a hot date," Chan protests gamely, rolling his eyes and shooting a pleading look up at Felix, who as far as he's concerned is the only one of them who's actually on his side, ever.

"Sure," Jisung says, digging one hand into Hyunjin's hair and combing through the waved tangles. "You just went to a bar with a smoking hot coworker, totally platonically." He winces when Chan tries to kick at him for the pun, but uses Hyunjin as an impromptu shield. "You really need to improve your game, chief, if you let that whole opportunity pass without making even _some_ kind of move."

"I just don't understand why you're all obsessed with the idea that I want to date him," Chan grumbles, burying his face behind his coffee mug, which is just on the side of steaming that he likes.

"Dude, we have eyes."

"I haven't even _seen_ him, and I still think you should ask him out," Hyunjin mumbles sleepily, not even seeing Chan's betrayed look he shoots down at him. "You're too much of a homebody to meet someone outside of work, anyways."

"He's got a point," Felix finally offers, wincing through a grin as Chan quickly redirects his look up to him. "He already knows you're a vampire, right? So you don't even have to worry about that whole conversation."

"Speaking of that whole conversation," Chan interrupts, before Jisung can get it into his head that he needs to continue on this topic of discussion, "I gotta eat."

He hauls himself off the couch, Jisung quickly whining about the sudden exposure of his toes to the chilly air of the apartment, and Felix tags along behind him as he heads back into the kitchen to pull open the freezer door.

"Do you think that this siren had anything to do with the whole disappearance?" Felix asks, voice low in deference to Changbin still sleeping, apparently, through everyone's nonsense. He pulls a small soup pot out of one of their cabinets and sets some water to boil, while Chan pulls out a frozen, metal foil packet out of his section of the freezer.

"I don't know. I really don't think so," he says, and tosses the blood packet into the pot of water while it warms up. "She seems more like an upset girlfriend than someone with something to hide. I think she was more freaked about Woojin threatening to turn her in for singing, honestly," he clarifies, taking a bracing sip of coffee and feeling the way the warmth seems to spread all the way to his toes.

"Geez, he said that?"

"I think it was mostly just to get her to go with us." Chan leans one hip against the counter and shifts his feet in his socks. "It's a little crazy, though, that she's been singing like that. Pretty regularly, too, it seems like - people knew her name and everything."

Felix nods absently, scraping at the bottom of his yogurt as Chan pokes at the packet in the water to test if it was thawed enough yet. "She must really like singing, huh?"

"She must."

Chan finishes his coffee as the water starts steaming gently, and he rinses out his mug while Felix sets in on another yogurt. "Well hey, it's Friday," he adds, bumping Felix's hip with his as he finally turns the burner off and grabs the corner of the packet to pull it out of the water. "Excited for a bit of a break?"

"Excited to sleep and lesson plan, yeah," Felix grumbles, but bumps Chan back.

At this point in his life Chan's gotten pretty good at finding the little perforated edge of the foil packet, and he rips off the corner neatly before pouring the warmed blood into his mug. The end result looks pretty macabre, a Simpsons mug with a chipped rim full of blood, but as far as things go it's gotten to be almost normal here, at least.

Chan drinks it quickly, leaning back against the counter and listening to the slowly increasing bustle of activity through the kitchen and into the living room as Changbin eventually deigns to greet the rest of them with his grumbly presence.

It still hits a little strange, the way that this - blood - seems to cut into his hunger in a different way than food ever did. It pushes warmth all the way through his extremities, like his coffee did earlier but so much heavier and lasting, somehow.

It tastes pretty gross, sure, but he's not about to complain, much less try to find some other source. He's had to deal with some pretty sketchy things in his line of work, but the non-regulated blood industry that exists outside of the government's handy deliveries of the stuff isn't something Chan has ever, ever wanted to touch.

He's swallowing the last of it down when Changbin pops his head in the kitchen and gives him a look.

"You look ready for work," he says, eying Chan's sleep pants and t-shirt. "Aren't we supposed to be there bright and early to jump Nayeon outside of her office and get her to let us talk to that siren?"

Chan rolls his eyes and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before turning to the sink to give his hands and the mug a thorough washing. "Yeah, yeah, give me a second."

 

The whole department is buzzing a little when the three of them finally get to work, and they end up only getting part of the way towards their own office before a familiar trio stop them.

"Detective Im Nayeon sent us to look for you!" Minho says brightly, grinning at all three of them at once. "She said to tell you to come down to her office as soon as you get here."

"Technically, she said to tell you to 'get your asses down here ASAP'," Seungmin adds, pushing his wire glasses up his nose and leveling a very unimpressed look at Changbin's wrinkled shirt. "But we didn't think that was a necessary part of the message."

"And yet you still managed to include it," Changbin replies, feigning a sense of awe. "You have such a way with words."

Chan doesn't bother hiding the way he elbows Changbin for the comment, and Seungmin easily switches his attention over one to the left to Chan. "You can follow us."

"We know where her office is," Jisung grumbles this time, even more irritated thanks to the twin quelling looks that Jeongin and Minho shoot him as they all turn to head back through the building in the opposite direction.

Nayeon, when they get to her office, looks like she's had about seven cups of coffee and maybe an adrenaline shot straight to the neck. "About time!" She all but vaults over her desk to get to them and slaps Chan on the chest with a spiral notebook. "I knew we'd have a lead from that place, didn't I tell you?"

"Did you?" Chan carefully takes the notebook from her, trying to ignore the instinct in the back of his mind that tells him to turn tail and run, or maybe just fall to the ground and play dead. For a human, Nayeon has always triggered some weird flight or fight instincts in him that he didn't think vampires usually had. "I take it the questioning went well?"

"Oh, I don't know, she won't talk to me." Nayeon rocks back to her heels and crosses her arms in front of her chest, although her smile doesn't slip an inch. "We got her here earlier this morning and she basically said she wouldn't talk to anyone but Woojin."

"What?" Changbin elbows Seungmin out of the way to stand next to Chan. "Why him?"

"Oh, I don't know - he has a very trusting face, doesn't he?" She sighs and actually frowns a bit, now. "She seems to be convinced that we're one wrong answer away from tossing her in jail for non-human violations. I tried to tell her that we're going to get her absolved for all that, so long as she puts a stop to it going forward, but she won't listen."

"But she'll talk to Woojin still?" He basically told her he was going to arrest her last night, Chan adds silently, but decides against actually voicing it.

"Seems that way. And now you, too."

"Me?" Chan glances down at the page that the notebook is open to, although it's empty.

"Woojin asked for you." Nayeon sighs, ignoring Chan's confused double take up at her. "I think he's needing a second opinion. That's for you to take notes," she says, nodding down at the spiral notebook he's still clutching to his chest, "and report back to me. Got it?"

"Right." With that Chan gets very firmly shepherded out of Nayeon's office, leaving his wolves and Woojin's interns standing awkwardly just inside the entrance to the room.

The rooms reserved for missing persons cases aren't anywhere near as intense as the ones for homicides or those types of crimes - just a small interview booth, usually, with a table in the middle and a few chairs. There are cameras, of course, and enough protective charms and anti-spell writing on the witness’s side of the room to protect against any of that kind of thing, but the rooms themselves are a bit more on the cozy side of things than other places in the precinct.

Nayeon pulls to a stop in front of one of the larger rooms and, one hand on the doorknob, swivels to give Chan one more bracing look. "Don't freak her out," she says, and shakes her head when he just gives her a disbelieving eyebrow raise. "I'm serious, she seems delicate about this whole thing. I don't want her to shut down so much that we can't get anything useful out of her."

"I'll be so gentle, Detective," he shoots back, waving his free hand up in the air like he's at a stick-up. "She'll think she's talking to a big teddy bear, that's how gentle I'll be."

Nayeon snorts but seems mollified, and the next thing Chan knows she's opening the door just enough to hip-check him into the room before closing the door again with a slight click.

Woojin perks up immediately when Chan stumbles into the room, and he's briefly blinded by his grin. "Good morning!" he says, looking like he wants to stand up to greet him before deciding against it, and ending up just kind of awkwardly half-out of his chair. "Thanks for coming - I guess Detective Nayeon found you?"

"I got jumped by your three lackeys, more like," Chan jokes, raising a hand to wave awkwardly across the small, rectangular table at Jihyo. "Long time no see."

Jihyo sits across the table in one of the simple, just kind of uncomfortable, chairs provided for witnesses. She's wearing a thick sweater and jeans, and looks like she didn't sleep at all last night.

Chan wouldn't really blame her, honestly.

She takes him in for a long second before turning back to Woojin. "You're messing with me."

"Nope." Woojin shrugs at her, settling back down in his chair while Chan slowly takes the one next to him. "Doesn't seem like the stereotypes, huh?"

Chan shoots him a questioning look, and Woojin tilts his head apologetically. "Told her about the vampire thing," he says, stiffening his jaw a little as if he's worried Chan'll be mad. "Hope that's okay."

"What? No, uh, it's fine." Chan feels a lot like he just jumped onto a treadmill while it was mid-motion, and he's stumbling to catch up. "Yeah, I'm 100 percent vamp. I'd drop fangs but I'm still kind of trying to not bust open my scabs from doing that yesterday." He grins, tentatively, at Jihyo.

She doesn't respond, just continues surveying him carefully. Instead Woojin speaks up again, tapping his fingers against the table as he does.

"I get that I may not have a ton of first-hand knowledge of being on the restricted species list," Woojin says, with the air that he's picking back up at a conversation that was interrupted when Chan bust into the room. "But I still know what it's like to be non-human in this city, and Chan of all people will be able to sympathize with you. I might not be on any lists," he continues, shooting Chan a good-natured look, "but I've never exactly been the most normal kid in any classroom growing up."

At that Jihyo finally moves, propping her elbows up on the table in front of her and folding her hands together in front of them. "The Undertow thing wasn't for money, you know." Her voice is sweet, if tired, and Chan remembers with the prickle of goosebumps what she had sounded like singing last night. "I'm not that desperate. I have a steady job," she continues, dipping her eyes back down to look at her nail polish, which is chipping a bit at the tips of her nails. "I didn't need to sing there."

"You just wanted to sing somewhere, right?" Chan shrugs when she looks up at him, expression hard to read but just a degree more open. "Sirens are built to sing - it's in your blood, basically, as cheesy as that sounds. I figure that's gotta be hard to ignore at some point."

Jihyo's gaze stays on him, brows pulled down and together just a bit in her concern as she regards him. Eventually she seems to come to some conclusion, unspoken, because she continues on. "When I was a kid I wanted to be in musicals," she says. "My parents are both sirens, so it was fine for me to sing around them when I was growing up."

"The legal incident reporting procedures for sirens kick in at, what, age seven?" Chan adds, shifting on his chair to mimic her posture, leaning forward above the tabletop. "You probably got in a bit of trouble once you started going to school."

Woojin twitches at his wording but Jihyo actually laughs, barely a breath of sound but just enough for Chan to relax, too. "I kept forgetting that I couldn't even really hum," she says. "It was really hard to go from being able to sing as much as I wanted at home to not being able to even do _hum_ at school, or with my friends."

She twists, untwists, and twists her fingers back together, eyes dropping again to look at them before she continues. "I - Undertow was the only place I could really go. It helped, a lot."

"When did Mina start going there?" Woojin asks calmly, voice gently and low. Chan thinks for a second about Nayeon's warning and almost laughs - she's already got the non-human equivalent of a teddy bear in here, she didn't have to worry about _him_.

"We met earlier, at this charity thing her family was putting on." Jihyo accepts the change in conversation topic more easily than Chan would have thought. "I was there with the school district. I'm a teacher," she adds, seemingly for Chan's benefit as she looks up at him. "You understand, right, how I really can't have any of this getting out to my employer?"

He swallows, the feeling of it thick in his throat. Felix had had a hard enough time getting his license, even though he didn’t have any registered issues from his were side. The city was cautious with who they exposed to their children - he couldn't imagine the trouble a siren would have in getting accepted. "Yeah. I get that."

Jihyo nods and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "Well. I met Mina there - you two never actually talked to her, right?" She takes in their twin head shakes and her mouth twists. "You'd get it, if you had. She's... charming. Sweet, friendly. Much sweeter than her family name would have you think."

"Not a fan of the Myoui's, then?" Chan asks before he can think about it, but Jihyo's shoulders only stiffen a degree, just enough to see.

"They don't have the best reputation, really." She pauses, her mouth curving deeper into a frown, and Chan kind of wants to take her hands just so they don't twist any tighter on themselves. "That didn't really improve upon hearing more about them from Mina, either."

"They didn't approve of the two of you being together, right?"

Jihyo frowns at Woojin's question. "What do you think?"

The light touch of magic that serves as a screen in between their sides of the table, invisible unless you knew what you were looking for, sparks a little in warning at her increase in volume.

Jihyo glances up at the corner of the screen and sighs, letting her shoulders fall. "It was never 'about me', you know?" She blinks hard and avoids their eyes. "It was always about Mina not being able to focus at work, or needing to spend more time with her grandparents, or whatever."

Chan shifts in his seat, pushing the blank notebook further away from him. "It wasn't really, though."

"They didn't like her even being around a siren, that much was for sure." Jihyo untwists her fingers and grips her elbows instead. "I don't know how they even found out I was a siren - I definitely never told them, and Mina wouldn't have, either. They knew I was a mer, and maybe that was enough for them to just look me up in the registry. I'm sure they have people in their HR departments or something that would be able to do that for them."

"Undertow was the only place we could really meet," she continues, still not looking quite at them. "Mina didn't really like the place, but she always knew how important it was for me to be able to sing."

"You sang for her, then?" Woojin asks.

"Of course." Jihyo actually smiles at that, and it softens her whole face. "She never really fell for the glamour that much, even at the beginning."

Chan takes in her expression and the way the apples of her cheeks are going slightly pink, and he can't help but grin at her. "Young love moves quick, huh?"

She snorts at him, and Woojin startles at the sound. "Mina thought it was hilarious, how everyone else would collapse when I sung and she got to just sit there and listen." Jihyo settles down a bit, smile staying on her mouth but fading just a little as if remembering why exactly the three of them are sitting there. "Do you really not know where she is? At all?"

Chan glances at Woojin and finds him looking back, and they share a quick, uncomfortable look before Woojin looks back at Jihyo. "We're devoting as many resources as we can to the investigation," he says, which doesn't seem to assuage any of her concerns. "That's why we were glad to find you and talk to you, though, to see if you know anything that might help us."

"Well I don't," Jihyo retorts, tone sharper now. "I - I haven't seen her for weeks, now," she adds, turning from Woojin to Chan, as if he'll understand her more. "The last time I saw her was the weekend before - before she disappeared."

"We don't think you had anything to do with her disappearance," Chan interjects before she can get more worked up, even though he's not sure if they really do think that. "We just - was there anything she was doing in those last couple of weeks that was different? Meeting new people, doing different things that were out of the usual at all? Her parents aren't being very cooperative beyond their own theories about people who have it out for their business," he clarifies, shrugging at her. "You're the first person we've been able to actually get any information out of about her personal life."

Jihyo's mouth twists to the side, not quite a frown, as she thinks. "You said there was signs of struggle at her apartment, right?"

Chan looks at Woojin - he certainly hadn't said any of that, and he was pretty sure they weren't supposed to disclose details about the crime during questioning - but Woojin flushes awkwardly and nods. "Knocked over furniture and a strong magical residue," he says, kicking at Chan underneath the table as if to tell him not to say anything. "Um. A small amount of blood, too."

Jihyo's gaze sharpens on Woojin at that last detail but she doesn't move to speak immediately, instead tapping her mouth with one hand as she looks the two of them over.

Finally, after a long moment her eying them and Chan's stomach getting progressively more and more twisted in on itself, she lets out a held breath and extends her folded hands across the table towards them. She stops just on the edge of the invisible spell screen, and leans forward over the table to get just a few inches closer to them. "Just to summarize, for my own understanding, none of this is getting disclosed to my place of employment?"

"You're allowed complete anonymity outside of people in need-to-know positions within the investigation," Woojin clarifies. "We don't even tell her parents about the witnesses that we speak to."

Jihyo nods shortly, as if this confirms something, and she switches her attention to Chan. "You study non-humans, right? That's your whole thing?"

Chan startles a bit at getting suddenly addressed, but he nods quickly. "One of the leading experts on the force," he says, and shoots her a thumbs-up.

"Chan practically invented non-human criminology specializations as we know them today," Woojin adds, which - okay, Chan didn't need to know he had that much of a thing for handsome dudes acknowledging his scholarship prowess, but he'll take it. "He's more than qualified to be handling a case like this, if that's what you're concerned about."

"That's not - I believe that, okay, it's something else." Jihyo's gaze is sharp, and Chan is reminded suddenly that siren song, evolutionarily, was developed in part to give sirens a hunting advantage over your standard mer. He half expects her to have pointed piranha teeth when she speaks next, but they're just as dull as ever when she asks, "In your many years of study, have you ever heard of anything that nullifies siren song?"

Woojin glances over at Chan too, curious, as Chan blinks in thought. "I - I've definitely never heard of anything that was proven to stop the effect of it," he says, hedging a bit as he starts to talk. "There are some folk charms that people thought would protect them against it - a lot of old stuff from Scandinavian countries, and Japan too, but modern tests don't show that they actually do anything. The most we really know to do right now is just try to block out people's hearing as much as possible, and there are some spells for that that are more effective than others."

Jihyo listens to him speak, mouth twisting more and more as he goes on, before sighing as he finishes. "I'll tell you what I know," she says, eyes not leaving Chan as she talks, "in exchange for some - academic advising, I guess."

"What, exactly, does that entail?" Woojin asks before Chan can, tone strangely on edge - protective.

"I figure that while I have the ear of one of the top experts in non-human studies I should ask him for some help, right?" Jihyo tips her head to the side as she pins Chan with her gaze, eyes a soft brown but piercing. "I've heard some things, mostly unconfirmed, about a number of spells that are stuck in the testing phase. Now that I don't exactly have access to Undertow anymore, I'd really like another option for singing."

Chan leans back in his chair, feeling like he has his feet under him for the first time in maybe this whole conversation. "You want me to look into these spells?"

"I have the strange suspicion that they may be getting held up in the pipeline by people who don't necessarily want people like me to fully exist in public spaces." She arches an eyebrow at him. "You'd understand that, right?"

"'Course." The pessimist that Chan has mostly tried to stamp out throughout college and work, now, arches its head in his stomach and pokes up his ribs to his heart. "I can definitely give that some attention. If your testimony is really as important as you think it is, I should have more free time anyways."

"Wonderful." Jihyo's posture relaxes, and she looks to Woojin now. "You said there was magical residue and blood? Was there anything else there?"

Woojin frowns at the questioning being directed towards him now, but he answers gamely enough. "Not much."

"A bracelet," Chan adds, earning himself an amused look from Woojin. "What?"

"Nothing." Woojin shakes his head, and looks back to Jihyo. "Yeah, a bracelet too. Charmed, somehow, but we haven't narrowed that down exactly."

The mention of the bracelet perks something up in Jihyo, and she leans even further forward over the table. If she could, Chan thinks, she would have her forehead completely pressed against the clear barrier of magic in between them. "That was probably Mina."

Woojin and Chan blink in time with each other, glance at the other, and then back at Jihyo. "Mina?" Chan says first. "She - she was magic-inert, wasn't she?" He directs that at Woojin, who nods carefully, hesitantly.

"Right." Jihyo's eyes are sharp, bright, and focused entirely on Chan. "We, of all people, know what it’s like to try to break out of the barriers of something that we feel was forced onto us from birth, right? Why would Mina be any different?"

There's a pause, where all Chan can seem to hear is the low fizz of the magic that holds up the screen between them, and the pounding of Woojin's pulse next to him.

Then, Woojin's fists tighten in his lap, and he jerks to attention. "She was teaching herself magic?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooooh Mina... whatcha doing girl...
> 
> Also - it's not stated explicitly here, but the reason Mina wasn't affected by Jihyo's siren song was because she was in love with her. For more siren lore see my siren sewoon fic lol
> 
> Hmu up [twitter](https://twitter.com/ponyoprince) or [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/ponyoprince)to chat!! I'm SO appreciating all of your kudos and comments, and I'd love to talk more!


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